Correcting a terrible post-renovation mistake, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has reinstalled Claude Monet’s “Water Lilies,” a nearly forty-two-foot-long triptych, along with related paintings, in a room of its own. The museum is located at 11 W. 53rd Street in Manhattan, and the exhibit runs through April 12, 2010.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/notebook/2009/10/05/091005gonb_GOAT_notebook_schjeldahl
http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=80220

Courtesy of private-equity-reporter Peter Lattman: Lattman reports that a federal grand jury is investigating whether Hilton, until recently known as Hilton Hotels Corp., and several of its former executives should face criminal charges for allegedly stealing tens of thousands of pages of confidential documents from rival Starwood Hotels. The grand jury is part of a six-month-old Justice Department probe into allegations that Hilton, owned by private-equity firm Blackstone Group, used trade secrets taken by former Starwood executives, who defected to Hilton last year, to develop its own luxury brand to compete with Starwood's successful W chain. In April, Starwood sued Hilton, accusing its rival of using stolen confidential Starwood documents to develop a new luxury hotel chain. Now, in regard to the criminal probe, federal prosecutors are considering an aggressive approach, potentially bringing criminal charges against Hilton itself, in addition to possible charges against individuals, people familiar with the matter said. The investigation, which is being handled by the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan, is expected to reach a conclusion in the next two months, these people said. WSJ Law Blog October 7, 2009

Perhaps a prehistoric crematorium, 33-foot-wide (10-meter-wide) "Bluestonehenge" was discovered just over a mile (1.6 kilometers) from the original Stonehenge near Salisbury, United Kingdom, scientists announced on October 5. The 5,000-year-old ceremonial site is thought to have been a key stop along an ancient route between a land of the living, several miles away, and a domain of the dead—Stonehenge. Named for the color of its long-gone stones, Bluestonehenge, or Bluehenge, was dismantled thousands of years ago, and many of its standing stones were integrated into Stonehenge during a rebuilding of the larger monument, according to the archaeologists. The circle of an estimated 25 bluestones was surrounded by a henge—an earthwork with a ditch and bank. The henge has been tentatively dated to 2400 B.C. But flint arrowheads found at the stone-circle site are of a type that suggests the rocks were erected as early as 3000 B.C. The team now believes Stonehenge incorporates the 25 bluestones that originally stood at Bluestonehenge. Only a few bluestone pieces were found at the new site, and "that is telling you that the stones are being taken out whole," said dig co-director Julian Thomas of the University of Manchester. Bluestonehenge's stones were dragged along the avenue to Stonehenge during a major rebuilding phase around 2500 B.C., the archaeologists speculated. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/10/091005-mini-stonehenge-bluestonehenge-bluehenge.html

Women in the Labor Force: A Databook (2009 Edition), U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, September 2009
“The past several decades have been marked by notable changes in women’s labor force activities. Women’s labor force participation is significantly higher today than it was in the 1970s, particularly among women with children, and a larger share of women work full time and year round than in past decades. In addition, women have increasingly
attained higher levels of education: among women aged 25 to 64 who are in the labor force, the proportion with a college degree roughly tripled from 1970 to 2008. Women’s earnings as a proportion of men’s earnings also have grown over time. In 1979, women working full time earned 62 percent of what men did; in 2008, women’s earnings were 80 percent of men’s."

FTC Publishes Final Guides Governing Endorsements, Testimonials
News release: The Federal Trade Commission announced that it has approved final revisions to the guidance it gives to advertisers on how to keep their endorsement and testimonial ads in line with the FTC Act. The notice incorporates several changes to the FTC’s Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising, which address endorsements by consumers, experts, organizations, and celebrities, as well as the disclosure of important connections between advertisers and endorsers. The Guides were last updated in 1980. Under the revised Guides, advertisements that feature a consumer and convey his or her experience with a product or service as typical when that is not the case will be required to clearly disclose the results that consumers can generally expect In contrast to the 1980 version of the Guides—which allowed advertisers to describe unusual results in a testimonial as long as they included a disclaimer such as “results not typical”—the revised Guides no longer contain this safe harbor.

The Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Ennis House in Los Feliz, California has landed on the Multiple Listing Service at $15 million. The 1924 concrete-block structure has four bedrooms and 4 1/2 bathrooms in about 6,000 square feet. The Mayan-inspired state landmark sits on about three-quarters of an acre with city, canyon and ocean views. The seller is the Ennis House Foundation, a nonprofit that has spent about $6.5 million to restore the estate, the largest example of Wright's "textile block" style using patterned concrete. The house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. http://www.latimes.com/classified/realestate/hotprop/la-hmw-hotpropennis2-2009jul02,0,6967697.story

Women's voting rights became an issue in the 19th century, especially in Britain and the U.S. In the U.S. the woman suffrage movement arose from the antislavery movement (see abolitionism) and from the advocacy of figures such as Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who believed that equality should extend to both women and African Americans. They organized the Seneca Falls Convention (1848), which issued a declaration calling for woman suffrage and for the right of women to educational and employment opportunities. In 1850 Lucy Stone held the movement's first national convention. Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869 to secure an amendment to the Constitution granting women the right to vote, while Stone founded the American Woman Suffrage Association to seek similar amendments to state constitutions; in 1890 the two organizations merged as the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Following Wyoming's lead in 1890, states began adopting such amendments; by 1918 women had won suffrage in 15 states. After a woman suffrage amendment was passed by Congress, a vigorous campaign brought ratification, and in August 1919 the 19th Amendment became part of the Constitution. In Britain the first woman suffrage committee was formed in Manchester in 1865. In the 1870s suffragists submitted petitions bearing nearly three million signatures. Despite growing support, suffrage bills were continually defeated; in frustration, some suffragists became militant activists under the leadership of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. Parliament finally passed the Representation of the People Act in 1918, by which time women had already won voting rights in New Zealand (1893), Australia (1902), Finland (1906), Norway (1913), the Soviet Union (1917), Poland (1918), Sweden (1919), Germany (1919), and Ireland (1922). After World War II woman-suffrage laws were adopted in many countries, including France, Italy, India, and Japan.
Voting rights for women were introduced into international law in 1948 when the UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Women’s suffrage is also explicitly stated as a right under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, adopted by the United Nations in 1979.
Timeline of international women's suffrage by nation:
http://www.answers.com/topic/women-s-suffrage#

On October 7, 1949, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) was created, formally dividing the country for the next 41 years.
Learn more about the history of East Germany from the U.S. Library of Congress.
On October 7, 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed the first nuclear test ban treaty between the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union. http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/thisday/
October 8 is the birthday of science fiction writer Frank Herbert, (books by this author) born in Tacoma, Washington (1920). He got an assignment from the magazine California Living to write about a project that the government was sponsoring in Oregon to slow the spreading of the sand dunes on the coast. He went to Oregon to research, and he became so fascinated with the project that he ended up collecting far more material than he could ever fit into his piece. He wrote an article called "They Stopped the Moving Sands," which California Living never published. But Herbert couldn't stop thinking about the ecological implications of the growing sand dunes. He spent six more years researching and envisioning what would happen if the situation on the Oregon Coast was magnified to the scale of an entire planet. The result was his novel Dune (1965), considered one of the best science fiction novels ever written.
The Writer’s Almanac