Mariane Pearl to Speak at MCLA

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Mariane Pearl
NORTH ADAMS - Mariane Pearl, wife of slain journalist and former North Adams Transcript reporter Daniel Pearl, will appear at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts on Wednesday, March 5, at 7:30 p.m.

Part of the Hardman Lecture Series, her talk, "A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My Husband Danny Pearl," will take place in the Church Street Center. The event is free and open to the public.

A freelance journalist, Mariane Pearl writes a column, "Global Diary," for Glamour magazine that spotlights women activists around the world. The columns have been collected into a book, "In Search of Hope."

Pearl was thrust into the spotlight in 2002 when her husband, a bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, was kidnapped and murdered by Islamic extremists in Pakistan in early 2002.

Born Mariane Van Neyenhoff in Clinchy, Haute-de-Seine, France, Pearl was raised in Paris. She met her husband while he was on assignment there. They married in August 1999, and moved to Mumbai, India, where Daniel was the South Asia bureau chief for The Journal.

The couple later traveled to Karachi, Pakistan, to cover aspects of the war on terrorism. It was in Karachi that Daniel was kidnapped and later killed. Mariane was pregnant at the time, and their son, Adam Daniel, was born in Paris three months later.

Pearl's memoir, "A Mighty Heart," which deals with the events surrounding her husband's kidnapping and assassination, was adapted for a film of the same name starring Angelina Jolie, with whom she'd become a close friend, as herself and Dan Futterman as her husband. The film was released last spring.

She is a practicing Nichiren Buddhist and a member of Soka Gakkai International, a Buddhist association that promotes world peace and individual happiness.

Daniel Pearl began his career in journalism at the Transcript and later at The Berkshire Eagle before joining The Wall Street Journal.

The Hardman Lecture Series is made possible through the generosity of the Hardman Family Endowment.
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Study Recommends 'Removal' for North Adams' Veterans Bridge

By Tammy Daniels iBerkshires Staff

NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — Nearly a year of study and community input about the deteriorating Veterans Memorial Bridge has resulted in one recommendation: Take it down. 
 
The results of the feasibility study by Stoss Landscape Urbanism weren't really a surprise. The options of "repair, replace and remove" kept pointing to the same conclusion as early as last April
 
"I was the biggest skeptic on the team going into this project," said Commissioner of Public Services Timothy Lescarbeau. "And in our very last meeting, I got up and said, 'I think we should tear this damn bridge down.'"
 
Lescarbeau's statement was greeted with loud applause on Friday afternoon as dozens of residents and officials gathered at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art to hear the final recommendations of the study, funded through a $750,000 federal Reconnecting Communities grant
 
The Central Artery Project had slashed through the heart of the city back in the 1960s, with the promise of an "urban renewal" that never came. It left North Adams with an aging four-lane highway that bisected the city and created a physical and psychological barrier.
 
How to connect Mass MoCA with the downtown has been an ongoing debate since its opening in 1999. Once thousands of Sprague Electric workers had spilled out of the mills toward Main Street; now it was a question of how to get day-trippers to walk through the parking lots and daunting traffic lanes. 
 
The grant application was the joint effort of Mass MoCA and the city; Mayor Jennifer Macksey pointed to Carrie Burnett, the city's grants officer, and Jennifer Wright, now executive director of the North Adams Partnership, for shepherding the grant through. 
 
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