February Farewells
A lovely lady named Shell,
A guru to beatles and men,
Another good man named John
and one named Tom as well
not to mention Barry and Roy
Those are among this month's victims
of the accursed Grim Reaper
Making us desire all the more
the day when Death will be no more
And as if those individual demises
weren't already enough
we have senseless deaths too
via bombs, floods
and tornadoes too
Read on for more details...
A little anonymity for a dead celebrity?
Why not indeed...
The novel idea is not mine though, but truly Yahoo's,
and I wholeheartedly condone it!
After all, Shell Kepler's close ones
bereaved as they are now,
need not be reminded how famous she was
how dear she is to all of those who loved to see her
on daytime television's 'General Hospital' on ABC.
No, those who knew her best
and miss her terribly, now
and for as long as they will live,
all they want to focus on is
the endearing person that was lost to them today
for a time - until a Change Occurs...
They need to focus on that gem of a person
gone now from this place...
And they can do so by focusing
on her resplendent smile indeed
evocative of the warm and sweet nature
of both the lady as of the soul
which resided inside of her frame
and which is now freed from this plane of existence.
A soul whose mirror -her eyes- we need not see now
for that soul is now far, far away from here...
Rest In Peace, Shell Kepler.
+++
'General Hospital' Actress Kepler Dies
(as seen reported on another site)
"Actress Shell Kepler, who for years played the gossipy nurse Amy Vining on the TV soap opera "General Hospital," has died. She was 49. Kepler died Friday at Oregon Health & Science University hospital, which did not give the cause of death.
Kepler's busybody character on "General Hospital" was a fan favorite and enjoyed a long run, 1979-2002.
In addition to her run on "General Hospital," she was also in a 1982 Joan Collins film, "Homework," and a couple of episodes of the situation comedy "Three's Company."
>>Read the rest of the story"
"Talk About It: What did you like most about Kepler's character Amy Vining?"
The leader of the Transcendental Meditation movement Maharashi Mahesh Yogi during a visit to Helsinki in 1983. Surviving ex-Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr paid tribute Thursday to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the band's one-time spiritual advisor, who died this week. (As worded by the Free Press... Me, I would have marveled at how the Yogi outlived half of the Fab Four by such a substantial margin of years...)
(AFP/Lehtikuva/File)
Having said that, may the many followers of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi continue to take a holy dip at Sangam, continue to converge towards the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in India and continue to try and emulate him in every day life.
Unidentified practicioners enter at the gate to the house of the Maharishi during the memorial service for the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Vlodrop, southern Netherlands, February 7, 2008. Practitioners of the Transcendental meditation gathered at the Dutch home and international headquarters of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi on Thursday for a memorial and recalled the achievements of the late guru to the Beatles who brought transcendental meditation to the West.
(As originally seen on newswires across the globe.)
Photo Credits: REUTERS/Michael Kooren
I simply had to add the similar pic from half-way across the world - different set of circumstances, same results...
Feb. 8: Flowers are seen on the stairs leading to Kirkwood City Hall as the flag outside is at half staff in Kirkwood, Mo.
The full story, in the comments section.
Now, onwards to another completely different story - though it still involves someone's demise (otherwise, it wouldn't be here...)
It is in very poor taste to have a male model pose with cotton swab in hand and tongue firmly in cheek in order to ridicule even further the notion that a mere cotton swab could lead to someone's death - when we know fully well that, no matter how remote the chance, it did happen and the victim was male indeed.
Shame on the news agencies that went through the extra trouble to stage such a photo shoot - shame on them even if they just searched a bank of images for the express purpose of this abusive, heartless and disrespectful use of the pic, as it was clearly to go with the news item... A pic I refuse to add here and substituted an innocuous shot of cotton swabs to, yes - for I am not about to spread the bad taste that I denounce, myself, on my own site! To those who had the brilliant idea to use that sort of pic in that context, I have but one thing to say... SHAME ON YOU.
I couldn't expect more from punks - but from the press, I did expect more decency, yes!
Daniel St-Pierre died in March 2007, two days after he accidentally pierced his eardrum with a cotton swab.
St-Pierre, 43, died of meningitis-induced intracranial complications caused by a bacterial ear infection that he developed after accidentally piercing his eardrum with a cotton swab while trying to treat a painful earache.
Thou shall not mock thy brother's demise, no matter how far-fetched the circumstances - that is one extra commandment God Can Use His prophets to deliver to the mindless masses of today... That is if they will heed the message at all; and if there are any prophets worthy of the name to act as messengers left too...
R.I.P. DANIEL ST-PIERRE
Herbert "Barry" Morse is no more. No more of this earth - he's in the evermore now.
Stage veteran, with over a thousand roles in both the BBC as the CBC; character-actor, vital to any production that he was a part of; a one-man show specialist, on top of all that, and devoted humanitarian - really, Barry Morse is so much more than merely "a fine actor" - but that he surely was too.
A fine underrated actor whom I place right next to Leo McKern, Ian Hendry, Van Heflin and even Sir Laurence Olivier himself - Morse's story is so touching to read. Either click on his picture or go to the comments section for more details to see what I mean. Here is a man who was devoted to the last; a refined thespian who did things his own unimitable way and a gentle soul that we shall miss down here.
(Heck, we could spare the moon but not a kind soul like this!)
Amity sheriff Martin Brody, or rather Roy Scheider, has gone on the ultimate seaquest now, in the sea of infinity... Though his true favored role was Joseph Gideon (in All That Jazz) Scheider is better known for his sea adventures; something the late Llyod Bridges could have sworn would have been the case for him too, but due to other factors, wasn't so true for him... Scheider was the instrument of the "Jaws shot" - a pioneering “forward tracking zoom out” shot - and though he had much better lines to deliver throughout his career, the laconic (and lacklustre) one he delivered in "Jaws" (“You’re gonna need a bigger boat”) is the one that was voted 35th best movie quote by the American Film Institute in 2005. For my money, one of his very last roles (in an episode of Law & Order) had better lines than that - more meaningful ones, at the very least... Scheider could indeed elevate the quality of any film by his mere presence in it; nowhere was this more evident, perhaps, than in "52 Pick-Up" (a Cannon Films production from the mid-1980s) but he had not been on producers' minds much in the last decade or so, incredibly, and had worked sporadically due to that. His greatest regret though was not to have done more classical material on stage. Now, of course, even the most "pointlessly gung-ho" movie productions will not have the option of enhancing their final product and elevating their standards by casting Mr. Scheider anymore.
Their loss. And the Great Director Up There's gain!
BARRY MORSE AND ROY SCHEIDER are both on a grander stage now.
Now, I never do this here - more often on the LUMINOUS blog rather than here, really - but here goes a plea to sign a petition.
A petition to call for the abolishment of SUICIDE-CAUSING ANTI-DEPRESSANTS (and it could verily extend to those anti-depressants that can become a lethal, fatal cocktail when carelessly administered; such as those actor Heath Ledger was taking and that caused his untimely death.)
Anti-depressants that misfire to the point that they induce the sufferer to end his or her days are the pits of absurdism though.
Medication is meant to make us better - if it enhances the sickness rather than the healthy side of our metabolisms, than they (and the doctors that prescribe them) should indeed be banned forevermore.
If you sign only one petition this month - it has to be this one.
Thank you.
Labels: Barry Morse, Flood Victims, Guru M.M. Yogi, H.R. Landis, Henri Salvador, John McWethy, Katoucha, Kim Sjostrom, Roy Scheider, Shell Kepler, Tom Lantos, Tonya Selken, Tornado Victims, William Buckley
posted by Luminous (\ô/) Luciano™ @ 9:48 PM
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One of last 2 WWI vets in US dies
By MITCH STACY,
Associated Press Writer
Wed Feb 6, 11:14 PM ET
TAMPA, Fla. - Harry Richard Landis, who enlisted in the Army in 1918 and was one of only two known surviving U.S. veterans of World War I, has died. He was 108.
Landis, who lived at a Sun City Center nursing home, died Monday, according to Donna Riley, his caregiver for the past five years. He had recently been in the hospital with a fever and low blood pressure, she said.
"He only took vitamins and eye drops, no other medication," Riley said Wednesday. "He was 108 and a healthy man. That's why all of this was sudden and unexpected. He was so full of life."
The remaining U.S. veteran is Frank Buckles, 107, of Charles Town, W.Va., according the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. In addition, John Babcock of Spokane, Wash., 107, served in the Canadian army and is the last known Canadian veteran of the war.
Another World War I vet, Ohioan J. Russell Coffey, died in December at 109. The last known German World War I veteran, Erich Kaestner, died New Year's Day at 107.
Landis trained as a U.S. Army recruit for 60 days at the end of the war and never went overseas. But the VA counts him among the 4.7 million men and woman who served during the Great War.
The last time all known U.S. veterans of a war died was Sept. 10, 1992, when Spanish-American War veteran Nathan E. Cook passed away at age 106.
In an interview with The Associated Press in April in his Sun City Center apartment, Landis recalled that his time in the Student Army Training Corps involved a lot of marching. VA records show his entry date into the service was Oct. 14, 1918.
"I don't remember too much about it," said Landis, who enlisted while in college in Fayette, Mo., at age 18. "We went to school in the afternoon and drilled in the morning."
They often drilled in their street clothes.
"We got our uniforms a bit at a time. Got the whole uniform just before the war ended," Landis said. "Fortunately, we got our great coats first. It was very cold out there.
He told reporters in earlier interviews that he spent a lot of time cleaning up a makeshift sick ward and caring for recruits sickened by an influenza pandemic.
When asked whether he had wanted to get into the fight, Landis said, "No."
When the war ended on Nov. 11, 1918, Landis recalled a final march with his unit.
"We went down through the girls college, marching down the street. We got down to the courthouse square and there was a wall around this courthouse. We got to the wall and (the drill instructor) didn't know what to do and we were hup, two, three, four, hup, two, three, four," Landis said, laughing at the memory. "Finally, we jumped up on the wall and kept going until we got to the courthouse — hup, two, three, four — and he said dismissed."
He said he and some fellow recruits piled into a car to go to the next town.
"What we did there, why we were there, I couldn't tell you," Landis said.
He signed up to fight the Germans again in 1941, but at age 42 was rejected as too old.
"I registered, but that's all there was to it," Landis said.
"I was deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Mr. Landis," said LeRoy Collins Jr., executive director of the Florida Department of Veterans Affairs. "He was the last World War I-era veteran in Florida, and with his passing we say goodbye to a generation."
Landis was born in 1899 in Marion County, Mo.
After the war, he was a manager at S.S. Kresge Co., which later became Kmart, in Niagara Falls, N.Y., and Dayton, Ohio. His fondest memory was taking golf vacations with three friends and their families, a tradition that ended more than five decades ago with the death of his best friend.
"We really looked forward to getting our old foursome together and going somewhere for a couple of weeks," Landis said. "Sadly, my favorite best friend lived until he was only 60 years old. We were like brothers. We could talk about business, serious things and we could act like a couple of kids."
Landis retired to Florida's warmer climate in 1988 and lived in an assisted living center with his wife of 30 years, Eleanor.
His first wife, Eunice, died after 46 years of marriage. Landis had no children. He said he enjoyed a good game of golf until his health kept him off the course.
Landis laughed when asked the secret to his longevity.
"Just keep swinging," he said.
R.I.P. MR. LANDIS
Former ABC correspondent John McWethy dies after skiing into tree in Colorado
ASSOCIATED PRESS
07/02/2008
KEYSTONE, Colo. (AP) -- John McWethy, a retired ABC News correspondent who had to flee the Pentagon after the 2001 attacks but continued reporting live, died Wednesday after a skiing accident. He was 61.
Witnesses said McWethy was skiing fast on an intermediate trail when he missed a turn and slid chest-first into a tree, Summit County Coroner Joanne L. Richardson said. McWethy died of blunt force injuries, she said.
McWethy and his wife, Laurie, moved to Boulder after he retired to be closer to ski slopes and golf courses, ABC News President David Westin said in a statement. Before then, McWethy had been ABC News' chief national security correspondent.
He had to leave the Pentagon after a hijacked plane crashed into the building in 2001 attacks, but he kept reporting from a nearby lawn, Westin recalled.
"He was one of those very rare reporters who knew his beat better than anyone, and had developed more sources than anyone, and yet, kept his objectivity," Westin said.
He was awarded an honorary doctorate by his alma mater, DePauw University, and had a master's degree from Columbia University's journalism school.
What an odd way to go for a fearless representative of the Press who survived so many other things...
Proof once again that we never know WHEN... and HOW.
R.I.P. MR. McWETHY
Family guilty of failing to stop abuse
LEEDS, England, Feb. 6 (UPI) --
Four family members in England were warned Wednesday to expect prison terms for ignoring the battering that ended in a young wife's death.
A judge in Leeds allowed Phullan Bibi, 52, her daughters, Nazia Naureen, 28, and Uzma Khan, 23, and Uzma's husband Majid Hussain, 28, to remain free until they are sentenced in March, the Yorkshire Post reported.
"You should all return to the court in preparation for a custodial sentence," Judge James Stewart said.
Bibi's son, Shazad Khan, was convicted last year of killing his wife, Sabia Rani, 19.
A pathologist testified at the trial that Sabia Rani had 15 broken ribs and bruises over her body. She died five months after she arrived in Britain from Pakistan.
Malcolm Taylor of the Crown Prosecution Service said that few people have been convicted of failing to protect a vulnerable adult, The Times of London reported.
"Sabia Rani was the victim of horrific violence at the hands of her husband while her family chose to do nothing," he said.
Uzma Khan testified for her brother at his trial, saying her sister-in-law's injuries were caused by evil spirits.
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May this help Sabia Rani in finally being able to rest in peace...
Bolivian flood death toll at 48
TRINIDAD, Bolivia, Feb. 6 (UPI) --
At least 48 people have died and tens of thousands more have been displaced by flooding in Bolivia in recent weeks, a report said Wednesday.
In Beni Province, two rivers have overflowed their banks and threaten to isolate the region's capital city, Trinidad, the BBC reported. The high waters have prompted the government to declare a state of emergency and initiate relief efforts, the British news agency said.
Heavy seasonal rains have inundated the South American nation since November.
"We are experiencing one of the worst disasters of the past decade," said Hernan Tuco, deputy civil defense minister.
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R.I.P. FLOOD VICTIMS
6 dead after gunfire at Mo. meeting
By CHRISTOPHER LEONARD,
Associated Press Writer
KIRKWOOD, Mo. - A gunman opened fire at a meeting of this St. Louis suburb's city council Thursday night, killing two police officers and three other people before law enforcers fatally shot him, authorities said.
The five were killed after the gunman rushed the council chambers and began firing as he yelled "Shoot the mayor," according to St. Louis County Police spokesman Tracy Panus. Two others were wounded.
Kirkwood police fatally shot the gunman.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.
KIRKWOOD, Mo. (AP) — A gunman opened fire at a city council meeting in this St. Louis suburb Thursday night, hitting the mayor and several city officials, a newspaper reported. There was no immediate word on whether anyone was killed.
Police shot the gunman, who had hit Kirkwood Mayor Mike Swoboda, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which had a reporter at the meeting.
Also shot were a police officer, council members Michael H.T. Lynch and Connie Karr, and Public Works Director Kenneth Yost, the correspondent, Janet McNichols, told the newspaper.
The victims were taken to St. John's Mercy Hospital, but Kirkwood police told The Associated Press no one was available to provide information. St. Louis County police did not return several calls.
The reporter said the 7 p.m. meeting had just started when the gunman rushed into the council chambers yelling and opened fire with at least one weapon. He started yelling "shoot the mayor" while walking around and firing, hitting a police officer first, the reporter said.
McNichols also said the shooter fired at the city attorney, who tried to fight off the attacker by throwing chairs. The gunman then moved behind a desk where the council sits and fired at council members.
About 30 people were in the council chambers, the reporter said.
Dozens of emergency vehicles were on the scene, and an area of several blocks was cordoned off along a busy north-south corridor around City Hall.
Kirkwood is about 20 miles southwest of downtown St. Louis. City Hall is in a quiet area filled with condominiums, eateries and shops, not far from a dance studio and train station.
Mary Linehares, a teacher who lives about four blocks from City Hall and who walked down to the scene with her husband, described the town as quiet and eclectic.
"It's like a small town in St. Louis," Linehares told The Associated Press. "You can call it Mayberry."
R.I.P. KIRKWOOD SLAIN
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Woman Kills 2 Students in Louisiana College Classroom, Takes Own Life
Friday, February 08, 2008
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BATON ROUGE, La. — A 23-year-old woman killed two fellow students in a classroom at a vocational college Friday, then killed herself, police said.
The women apparently were shot in their seats in the second-floor classroom at Louisiana Technical College, Baton Rouge Sgt. Don Kelly said. About 20 people were in the room at the time, he said.
Officers ran into the building within four minutes of the first 911 call, which came at 8:36 a.m., Kelly said.
"There was mass pandemonium, people running," he said. "One officer — the first into the classroom — told me he could still smell gunpowder."
Police withheld the names of the shooter and the victims, ages 21 and 26, until their families could be notified.
The school — one of two LTC campuses in Baton Rouge and dozens around the state — offers classes in a dozen subjects including early childhood education, practical nursing, drafting and welding.
School administrators and campus police did not immediately return calls or e-mails.
Louis Davis, who said he was taking an automobile technology class Friday morning, said a teacher told the students to stay in class because there had been an incident, without adding details. Students had to stay in their classrooms for about two hours and were briefly questioned by police before being released for the day, he said.
Classes were canceled through Tuesday, and tentatively scheduled to resume Wednesday, said Jim Henderson, vice president of the Louisiana Community and Technical College System.
"This is a tragic day for Baton Rouge, when you come to a learning institution ... and become the victim of a violent crime," Mayor Kip Holden said at the scene.
Click here to read more on this story from FOX44.com.
R.I.P. STUDENTS GONE SO SOON... SO VIOLENTLY...
The truth shall be known about this one day - ALL things mysterious or purposefully hidden will come to be unveiled...
"And wait'll you see all the closet space!"
Thu Feb 7, 2008 8:11pm EST
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LONDON (Reuters) - An estate agent who took a prospective buyer to view a house in central England found the owner hanging dead in a closet, the agency said Thursday.
It was the first viewing of the 350,000-pound ($700,000) house which had been on the market for a week. The owner was hanging from a belt inside a walk-in closet in the main bedroom.
"It was quite a shock," said a spokesman for estate agents Hartleys. "Our agent quickly ushered everyone out, locked the property and called the authorities."
The owner, a single man in his 40s, is thought to have committed suicide. He inherited the house from his mother who died recently, the estate agents said.
(Reporting by Luke Baker; Editing by Robert Woodward)
© Reuters 2008 All rights reserved
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R.I.P. HOME OWNER/BACHELOR...
Teen Charged With Manslaughter After Schoolyard Beating Leaves Classmate Dead
Friday, February 08, 2008
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MyFOXKC.com
Dakota DeRemus, who died after a schoolyard fight.
OLATHE, Kan. — A Kansas teen was charged with involuntary manslaughter Wednesday in the death of a 16-year-old schoolmate who collapsed after a fight that was captured on a bystander's cell phone.
Dustin Howard, 16, of Gardner, Kan., is accused of unintentionally killing Dakota DeRemus while committing battery.
Four classmates witnessed the fight and one recorded it on his cell phone, investigators told KCTV5.com.
"If this rumor is true that they decided to videotape my grandson's death, then that is a sick thing to happen," Rosella Davis, DeRemus' grandmother, told the station.
Howard was ordered held in juvenile detention after a brief court hearing Wednesday that ended with the victim's father yelling at Howard's parents and being detained by police. The Johnson County district attorney's office is seeking to have Howard tried as an adult.
DeRemus, a sophomore at Gardner Edgerton High School, attended school Monday and was found dead about 5 p.m. near his home. His death was ruled a homicide after an autopsy determined that DeRemus had a heart condition.
When Johnson County Magistrate Judge Michael Farley ordered Howard to remain in the detention center, DeRemus' father, Scott DeRemus, yelled at Howard's mother and stepfather: "Two years! Two years your son has been bullying my son."
Deputies pinned DeRemus against a wall and later led him away in handcuffs. Other relatives declined to comment.
Howard, also a sophomore at Gardner Edgerton, appeared at the hearing via video feed from the detention center. After Scott DeRemus' outburst, Howard's sobbing mother was led from the courtroom.
Tim Yoho, deputy superintendent at Gardner Edgerton, said counselors had been called in to the school on Tuesday but school was not in session Wednesday through Friday because of snow and parent-teacher conferences.
Yoho said DeRemus' family had asked that no other information be released and said he could not comment on reports that DeRemus had been bullied.
Howard's next court appearance was scheduled for Feb. 19.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
FOXKC.com.
KCTV5.com reports
R.I.P. DAKOTA DeREMUS
No one will ever bully you again.
+++
More about the Kirkwood shooting...
Gunman Who Killed 5 at Missouri Council Meeting Left Suicide Note 'Truth Will Come Out'
Friday, February 08, 2008
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AP
.
KIRKWOOD, Mo. — A gunman carrying a grudge against City Hall left a suicide note on his bed warning "The truth will come out in the end," before he went on a deadly shooting spree at a council meeting, his brother told The Associated Press Friday.
Arthur Thornton, 42, said in an interview at the family's home that he knew his brother was responsible for the killings when he read the one-line note shortly after word of the shootings was broadcast.
"It looks like my brother is going crazy, but he's just trying to get people's attention," Thornton said, explaining he believed the note reflected his brother's growing frustration with local leaders. Police have the note, he said.
After storming the meeting and killing five people Thursday night, Charles Lee "Cookie" Thornton was fatally shot by law enforcers. Friends and relatives said he had a long-standing feud with the city, and he had lost a federal free-speech lawsuit against the St. Louis suburb just 10 days earlier. At earlier meetings, he said he had received 150 tickets against his business.
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RelatedVideo
'Army of One' Photo Essays
Missouri City Council Shooting Another brother defended his actions, calling it an act of war against the city.
=================================
"My brother Charles, he was in diplomatic talks with the city of Kirkwood to try to resolve these issues and therefore, he ended up and going ahead and going to war with an army of one," Gerald Thornton, the gunman's brother, told FOX News. “You have no paperwork that honestly depicts what was going on."
The victims were identified Friday as Public Works Director Kenneth Yost, Officer Tom Ballman, Officer William Biggs and council members Michael H.T. Lynch and Connie Karr. Flowers and balloons were placed outside City Hall Friday in their honor.
The city's mayor, Mike Swoboda, was in critical condition at an intensive care unit, St. John's Mercy Medical Center spokeswoman Lynne Beck said. Another victim, Suburban Journals newspaper reporter Todd Smith, was in satisfactory condition, Beck said.
"This is such an incredible shock to all of us. It's a tragedy of untold magnitude," Tim Griffin, Kirkwood's deputy mayor, said at a news conference. "The business of the city will continue and we will recover but we will never be the same."
St. Louis County Police spokeswoman Tracy Panus on Friday would not discuss what security measures, if any, were in place at City Hall at the time of the shootings.
The meeting had just started when the shooter opened fire, said Janet McNichols, a reporter covering the meeting for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
The gunman killed one officer outside City Hall, then walked into the council chambers, shot another and continued pulling the trigger, Panus said. A witness said the gunman yelled "Shoot the mayor!" as he fired shots in the chambers.
As the man fired at City Attorney John Hessel, Hessel tried to fight off the attacker by throwing chairs, McNichols said. The shooter then moved behind the desk where the council sits and fired more shots at council members.
"We crawled under the chairs and just laid there," McNichols told ABC's "Good Morning America." "We heard Cookie shooting, and then we heard some shouting, and the police, the Kirkwood police had heard what was going on, and they ran in, and they shot him."
Thornton was often a contentious presence at the council's meetings; he had twice been convicted of disorderly conduct for disrupting meetings in May 2006.
The city had ticketed Thornton's demolition and asphalt business, Cookco Construction, for parking his commercial vehicles in the neighborhood, said Ron Hodges, a friend who lives in the community. The tickets were "eating at him," Hodges said.
"He felt that as a black contractor he was being singled out," said Hodges, who is black. "I guess he thought mentally he had no more recourse. That's not an excuse."
Franklin McCallie, a retired Kirkwood High School principal who once attended Thornton's wedding, said his longtime friend once told him that the city would drop what had become thousands of dollars in fines if Thornton "would just follow the law."
"In our long talks, I begged him to do this," McCallie said in a statement e-mailed Friday to the AP. "But Cookie said it was a matter of principle with him and that he wanted to sue the city for millions of dollars."
McCallie called Thornton's deadly rampage "a brutal and inexcusable act, the act of a person who was not in his right mind when he did it."
The weekly Webster-Kirkwood Times quoted Swoboda as saying in June 2006 that Thornton's contentious remarks over the years created "one of the most embarrassing situations that I have experienced in my many years of public service."
The mayor's comments came during a meeting attended by Thornton two weeks after he was forcibly removed from the chambers. Swoboda had said the council considered banning Thornton from future meetings but decided against it.
In a federal lawsuit stemming from his arrests during two meetings just weeks apart, Thornton insisted that Kirkwood officials violated his constitutional rights to free speech by barring him from speaking at the meetings.
But a judge in St. Louis tossed out the lawsuit Jan. 28, writing that "any restrictions on Thornton's speech were reasonable, viewpoint neutral, and served important governmental interests."
Another brother, Gerald Thornton, said the legal setback may have been his brother's final straw. "He has (spoken) on it as best he could in the courts, and they denied all rights to the access of protection and he took it upon himself to go to war and end the issue," he said.
Kirkwood is about 20 miles southwest of downtown St. Louis. City Hall is in a quiet area filled with condominiums, eateries and shops, not far from a dance studio and train station. Despite its reputation locally for serenity, the city has grappled in recent years with crimes that brought it unwanted attention.
Down the street from City Hall is the Imo's pizzeria once managed by Michael Devlin, who kidnapped 11-year-old Shawn Hornbeck in 2002 and held him for four years before authorities rescued him in January 2007. Also rescued was Ben Ownby, another teenager Devlin abducted just days before Devlin's arrest.
Those crimes got Devlin life terms on state charges, as well as 170 years behind bars on federal charges that he made pornography.
In a neighborhood of modest, ranch-style homes, the gunman's house appears neatly landscaped with colorful mulch, the property's circle driveway lined by well-placed shrubs. There were two concrete sculptures of eagles on the front lawn, along with a large fountain.
Outside the house, a tattered U.S. flag flew at half-staff, not far from a handwritten sign reading simply, "RIP Cookie. Only God can judge you!!!!!"
Click here to read more on this story from MyFOXStLouis.com
Teacher Stabbed by Husband at Ohio Elementary School; Husband Later Found Dead
Friday, February 08, 2008
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PORTSMOUTH, Ohio — A man charged into a school where his estranged wife was a teacher Thursday morning, firing a gun before stabbing her as her fifth-grade class watched, police said. He later was found dead in his home after apparently shooting himself during a standoff with police.
The teacher, Christi Layne, underwent surgery and "should be fine," her lawyer told The Columbus Dispatch. Personnel at Cabell Hospital in Huntington, W.Va., where she is being treated, would not release her condition Thursday night.
Police originally said William Michael Layne shot his wife at Notre Dame Elementary, but Chief Charles Horner said it was unclear whether a gunshot fired in the school hit her.
Minutes before the teacher was stabbed, police say her husband stabbed and wounded a different woman in an alley about five blocks from the school.
Horner said at a news conference that he did not know whether that victim, Stephanie Loop, 22, knew either of the Laynes. Loop, 22, was at Grant Medical Center in Columbus, where staff would not release information about her.
Christi Layne had filed for divorce Jan. 25.
"She was terrified something like this would happen," said Rebecca Bennett, Christi Layne's attorney.
The shooting happened around 9 a.m. at the Catholic school on Portsmouth's main road near the Kentucky border. Student Emmaly Baker said she hid in the classroom's coatroom when the gunman came in.
"We heard gunshots, and we heard her yelling. I was scared," she told WSAZ-TV. "The police officer came and got us and she was still laying there and she was hurt really bad."
The suspect fled, and for hours after the shooting, a SWAT team surrounded a house about two miles away. Neighbors saw officers shooting at the house at one point, and police said those shots were with low-caliber bullets used to disable a surveillance camera Layne had installed in his yard.
Neighbor Jack Freeland said police eventually broke through the door with a battering ram and sent in a robot.
Police had been involved in a domestic dispute between the Laynes about two weeks ago, Horner said, but he did not give details.
The 56-year-old suspect, known as Mike, was a retired assistant director at the city's water distribution plant. He apparently shot himself in the head with a shotgun, Coroner Terry Johnson said. He was found in the garage behind his house, Horner said.
Freeland, 37, who often talked with the suspect, said that the couple had separated last summer and that Layne had been acting strangely for several months.
"At nighttime, he was out digging up his yard at 1, 2 in the morning," he said.
Parents, many with cell phones clutched to their ears, congregated across the street from the school and began leaving with their children around 10:30 a.m., said Kathy Hall, the office manager at the Cornerstone United Methodist Church, which also is across the street.
Police said they were reviewing surveillance video from the school to determine how Layne entered the building.
"The doors are locked. So people can't just walk into the school," said Larry Mullins, spokesman for the county's Emergency Management Agency.
The school and another Catholic school nearby were locked down after the stabbing, said Deacon Tom Berg, vice chancellor of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Columbus. Classes were canceled for Friday, Berg said.
Thursday evening, an overflow crowd of more than 500 jammed St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church in Portsmouth for a prayer service. Many said they did not know the victims but came to show support for the families and students affected by the attacks.
Mike Sammons said he went to the church because his daughter had been Christi Layne's student.
"You think in a small town, a small Christian school, you send your children there to kind of protect them from things like this," Sammons said. "But you just never know when or where things are going to happen."
R.I.P. CHRISTI LAYNE.
Your class will never forget you - traumatized as they are by what they witnessed...
And they thought it was going to be another humdrum, run-of-the-mill boring day at school...
Obviously, the man you married was not the right one - and it cost you your life.
May you be free from him now, Christi - and with Christ.
+++
Bomb kills 25 at Pakistan election rally
By ROBERT H. REID,
Associated Press Writer
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - A suicide bomber blasted a political gathering Saturday in northwestern Pakistan, killing at least 25 people, wounding dozens and stoking fears about security surrounding this month's parliamentary election.
In the south, an estimated 100,000 supporters of Benazir Bhutto turned out for her party's first major election rally since her assassination on Dec. 27. Bhutto's widowed husband told the crowd he had a responsibility to save the nation from President Pervez Musharraf's rule.
Also Saturday, riot police in the capital of Islamabad fired water cannons and tear gas against hundreds of lawyers protesting the detention of the deposed chief justice.
The violence underscored the deep tensions in Pakistan as the nation heads toward the Feb. 18 elections, which are meant to restore democracy after eight years of military rule. But campaigning has been overshadowed by Bhutto's killing, which U.S. and Pakistani officials blame on Islamic militants.
The blast occurred inside a hall where about 200 people had assembled for a political rally in the town of Charsadda in turbulent North West Frontier province, where Islamic extremists have been battling government forces.
The rally was organized by the Awami National Party — a secular organization which competes against Islamist parties for support among the ethnic Pashtun community.
Abdul Waheed, 22, who suffered burns from the blast, said the bomber struck as a member of the party was reciting verses from Islam's holy book, the Quran.
"I only heard the blast and cries and then something hit me and I fell down," Waheed told The Associated Press from his hospital bed in nearby Peshawar.
Television footage from the blast site, located in the sprawling residence of a party activist, showed the meeting hall littered with bloodstained clothes, police caps and overturned chairs. Policeman Mohammed Khan said two policemen were among the dead, and several children had been killed or injured.
No group claimed responsibility for the attack, but suspicion fell on Islamic militants with ties to the Taliban and al-Qaida. Interior Minister Hamid Nawaz said the militants are threatening all political parties in the northwest.
"They are against everyone," Nawaz told Dawn News TV.
Tensions have been running high across Pakistan since the charismatic Bhutto was killed in a suicide bombing in Rawalpindi. Nowhere is the tension higher than in the North West Frontier Province, a lawless region bordering Afghanistan where Islamic militants threaten government control.
Candidates have shied away from large outdoor rallies in favor of small gatherings of party stalwarts inside homes or high-walled compounds. Saturday's bombing showed even those tightly controlled gatherings are unsafe.
Nevertheless, about 100,000 people gathered Saturday in a sports stadium in the southern city of Thatta as Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party resumed its election campaigning — suspended for the traditional 40 days of mourning after her death.
In an emotional speech, Bhutto's husband, Asif Ali Zardari asked the crowd to "give me strength so that we can serve the country." He vowed to carry on his slain wife's mission.
"I have the responsibility to save Pakistan," Zardari said. "This is our country and we have to save it."
Zardari claimed his wife had been murdered by an establishment that she wanted to change.
"That is why they were against us," Zardari said. "If they try to stop me, I will destroy them and I hope you people will support me."
The government has rejected allegations that intelligence agents or members of the ruling party allied to Musharraf plotted to kill Bhutto.
The People's Party is widely expected to benefit from a sympathy vote. But it remains unclear whether Zardari can unite the party and dispel public doubts over allegations that he pilfered government funds and demanded kickbacks during Bhutto's two administrations in the late 1980s and 1990s.
Pir Bakhsh, a 24-year old laborer, said that Zardari's reputation was not good but that love for Bhutto "compels us to attend this rally."
"We will avenge the blood of Benazir. We don't have bombs. We are not terrorists, but we have political power and we will capitalize on this political power to avenge the death of Benazir," said Haji Jaffar, 75, a retired teacher. "The passion and love for (her party) has increased after Benazir's assassination."
Support for Musharraf plummeted when he launched a campaign last March against critics within the judiciary, including Chief Justice Iftikar Mohammed Chaudhry, who was fired three months ago and placed under house arrest.
About 1,500 lawyers tried to march Saturday to Chaudhry's barricaded home to protest his continued detention. When lawyers tried to breach the barbed-wire barricade, hundreds of riot police responded with tear gas, water cannon and a baton charge.
Several lawyers were roughed up, but there were no reports of serious injury.
Earlier Saturday, Pakistan's Bar Council announced the lawyers would boycott courts nationwide until the elections to pressure the government to restore Chaudhry and other senior judges.
Musharraf dismissed the chief justice and 60 other top judges after he declared emergency rule on Nov. 3, before the Supreme Court was to rule on the legality of his re-election as president. Musharraf lifted the emergency in mid-December but Chaudhry, his wife and children remain under house arrest.
__
Associated Press reporters Riaz Khan in Peshawar, Ashraf Khan in Thatta and Munir Ahmad in Islamabad contributed to this report.
R.I.P. 25 ELECTORAL VOTES
Rep. Tom Lantos dead at 80
By ERICA WERNER,
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - Rep. Tom Lantos, who as a teenager twice escaped from a Nazi-run forced labor camp in Hungary and became the only Holocaust survivor to win a seat in Congress, has died. He was 80.
Spokeswoman Lynne Weil said Lantos, a Californian, died early Monday at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center in suburban Maryland. He was surrounded by his wife, Annette, two daughters, and many of his 17 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Annette Lantos said in a statement that her husband's life was "defined by courage, optimism, and unwavering dedication to his principles and to his family."
Lantos, a Democrat who chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee, disclosed last month that he had been diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus. He said at the time that he would serve out his 14th term but would not seek re-election in his Northern California district, which takes in the southwest portion of San Francisco and suburbs to the south including Lantos' home of San Mateo.
President Bush praised Lantos in a statement as "a man of character and a champion of human rights."
"After immigrating to America more than six decades ago, he worked to help oppressed people around the world have the opportunity to live in freedom," Bush said. "As the only Holocaust survivor to serve in Congress, Tom was a living reminder that we must never turn a blind eye to the suffering of the innocent at the hands of evil men."
Flags were lowered to half-staff at the White House and U.S. Capitol.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, "Tom Lantos was a true American hero. He was the embodiment of what it meant to have one's freedom denied and then to find it and to insist that America stand for spreading freedom and prosperity to others."
Speaking to reporters at the State Department, she said, "He was also a dear, dear friend and I am personally quite devastated by his loss."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said that Lantos "used his chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee to empower the powerless and give voice to the voiceless throughout the world."
The timing of Lantos' diagnosis was a particular blow because he had assumed his committee chairmanship just a year earlier, when Democrats retook control of Congress. He said then that in a sense his whole life had been a preparation for the job — and it was.
Lantos, who referred to himself as "an American by choice," was born to Jewish parents in Budapest, Hungary, and was 16 when Adolf Hitler occupied Hungary in 1944. He survived by escaping from the labor camp and coming under the protection of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who used his official status and visa-issuing powers to save thousands of Hungarian Jews.
Lantos' mother and much of his family perished in the Holocaust.
That background gave Lantos a moral authority unique in Congress and he used it repeatedly to speak out on foreign policy issues, sometimes courting controversy. Lantos was outspoken on human rights in Sudan, Myanmar and elsewhere, and in 2006 was one of five members of Congress arrested in a protest outside the Sudanese Embassy over the genocide in Darfur.
He joined the Bush administration in strong support of Israel and was a lead advocate for the 2002 congressional resolution authorizing the Iraq invasion, though he would become a strong critic of President Bush's handling of the war.
Lantos was a frequent visitor to Hungary, meeting with political leaders and holding recurrent news conferences which were widely covered in the Hungarian press. He was widely recognized there for his calls for the respect of the human rights of the millions of ethnic Hungarians living in neighboring countries, especially Romania and Slovakia, whose cultural identity was a common target of those countries' communist regimes.
"Tom Lantos deserves that the millions of people in Central-Eastern Europe think about him for a moment and guard his memory," Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany said in parliament.
Lantos, who was elected to the House in 1980, founded the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in 1983. In early 2004 he led the first congressional delegation to Libya in more than 30 years, meeting personally with Moammar Gadhafi and urging the Bush administration to show "good faith" to the North African leader in his pledge to abandon his nuclear weapons programs. Later that year, President Bush lifted sanctions against Libya.
In October 2007, as Foreign Affairs chairman, Lantos defied administration opposition by moving through his committee a measure that would have recognized the World War I-era killings of Armenians as a genocide, something strongly opposed by Turkey. The bill has not passed the House.
Tall and dignified, Lantos never lost the accent of his native Hungary, but his courtly demeanor belied the cutting comments he would make in committee if the testimony he heard was not to his liking.
"Morally, you are pygmies," he berated top executives of Yahoo Inc. at a hearing he called in November 2007 as they defended their company's involvement in the jailing of a Chinese journalist.
"This is about as believable as Elvis being seen in a Kmart," was his retort to a witness testifying before a subcommittee he headed in 1989 that led a congressional investigation of Reagan-era scandals at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Lantos was elected to Congress after spending three decades teaching economics at San Francisco State University, working as a business consultant and serving as a foreign policy commentator on television. He challenged GOP incumbent Rep. Bill Royer in 1980 and won narrowly, subsequently winning re-election by comfortable margins.
"It is only in the United States that a penniless survivor of the Holocaust and a fighter in the anti-Nazi underground could have received an education, raised a family and had the privilege of serving the last three decades of his life as a member of Congress," Lantos said upon announcing his retirement last month. "I will never be able to express fully my profoundly felt gratitude to this great country."
Lantos came to the United States in 1947 after being awarded a scholarship to study at the University of Washington in Seattle. In 1950 he married Annette, his childhood sweetheart, with whom he'd managed to reunite after the war. The couple moved to the San Francisco Bay area so Lantos could pursue a doctorate in economics at the University of California, Berkeley.
The first major bill Lantos passed in Congress was to give honorary American citizenship to Wallenberg, whom he called "the central figure in my life." But Lantos sometimes shied away from talking about his experiences in the war. When he joined a lawsuit in 1984 to seek Wallenberg's release from the Soviet Union — Wallenberg was captured and imprisoned by Soviet troops after World War II — Lantos told The Associated Press that he "didn't want to dwell on the details" of the dangers he faced from the Nazis.
Lantos joined the Hungarian Underground after the Nazi occupation but was captured and sent to a forced labor camp 40 miles north of Budapest, according to the biography on his congressional Web site. He was beaten severely when he tried to escape, but feeling he had nothing to lose he made another attempt. This time he made it back to Budapest and to one of the safehouses that Wallenberg had established.
Lantos credited Wallenberg's protection, his own Aryan appearance — blond hair, blue eyes — and a good measure of luck with helping him survive the war. But he said that at the time he didn't think he had much of a chance of staying alive.
"I was sixteen, but I was very old," he said in an interview for "The Last Days," the 1999 book accompanying the Steven Spielberg documentary of the same name that focused on the experience of Hungarian-American survivors.
"The bloodbath, the cruelty, the death that I saw, so many times around me during those few months between March of 1944 and January of 1945 made me a very old young man."
Lantos and his wife had two daughters, Annette and Katrina, who between them produced 18 grandchildren, one of whom died young. According to Lantos, his daughters were following through on a promise to produce a very large family because his and his wife's families had perished in the Holocaust.
R.I.P. Tom Lantos - you were a survivor and an amazing man but even survivors have to go someday...
You are now close to Him.
Bride dies during marriage's first dance
Sat Feb 9, 7:04 PM ET
DAVIE, Fla. - Kim Sjostrom wanted a real-life version of the film "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," which played in the background as friends fixed her hair and makeup before her own marriage ceremony.
But less than an hour after she and Teddy Efkarpides were wed, Sjostrom crumpled in her husband's arms during a Greek song that means "Love Me."
At 36, Sjostrom was dead from heart disease.
The wedding had became a project at Davie Elementary School, where Sjostrom taught first grade. Fellow teachers provided the wedding gown, the flowers and decorations. One of them, an ordained minister, performed the ceremony.
"It was perfect for her," said Dominic Church, the minister friend.
Sjostrom carried blue and white flowers during the ceremony — the colors of the Greek flag — as she exchanged vows with Efkarpides, a 43-year-old carpenter and Navy veteran. They had met three years to the day before the Jan. 19 wedding.
During the couple's first dance, Sjostrom complained of being lightheaded. Efkarpides thought his wife, a diabetic, needed sugar, but she collapsed.
Wedding guests, paramedics and doctors at a nearby hospital were unable to revive her.
She had a previous cardiac episode in her 20s and was a poster child — literally — for juvenile diabetes, relatives and friends said. Efkarpides recalled seeing the poster featuring her on New York subways.
He consoles himself by reading a list of "101 Reasons Why I Love You" that Sjostrom gave him their first Christmas together. "Number 1. You make me smile."
No. 98 is especially difficult: "You're the one I want to grow old with."
What a sad story.
Some marriages are better never to have been - but this was clearly not one of those and yet it ends before it truly began.
R.I.P. KIM SJOSTROM
Teddy Efkarpides lost a wife and a lovely bride - but he gained an angel ever by his side.
+++
68-vehicle crash kills 1, injures dozens
Sun Feb 10, 7:38 PM ET
HAZLETON, Pa. - A blinding snow squall caused a 68-vehicle pileup on an interstate highway in northeastern Pennsylvania, killing at least one motorist and injuring several dozen, authorities said.
The snow led to the mid-afternoon pileup on Interstate 81. Northbound lanes were shut down and motorists detoured.
A woman died when her car became wedged underneath a tractor-trailer, said Lt. Jason Zoshak of Hazleton Township Fire and Rescue. About 35 people were injured. And at least 24 people whose cars were not drivable were placed in shelters.
"They had a heavy snow squall going through the area, zero visibility, high winds," he said. "There were vehicles everywhere."
Eighteen people were taken to Hazleton General Hospital, where most were being treated for minor injuries. Nursing supervisor Monica Link said she does not know whether any will be admitted.
R.I.P. Unlucky Motorist...
To be the sole victim in a sixty-eight vehicle pile-up, you had to have been the unlikeliest one of all...
Or the luckiest of that particular contingent of drivers and polluters?
One can look at it either way.
It is almost always a question of perspective, with these kind of things...
+++
Roy Scheider of 'The French Connection' and 'Jaws' dies at 75
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - Roy Scheider, the one-time boxer whose broken nose and pugnacious acting style made him a star in "The French Connection" and who went on to utter one of cinematic history's most memorable lines in "Jaws," has died. He was 75.
Scheider died Sunday at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences hospital in Little Rock, hospital spokesman David Robinson said.
The hospital did not release a cause of death but Scheider had been treated for multiple myeloma at the hospital's Myeloma Institute for Research and Therapy for the past two years.
Scheider earned two Academy Award nominations - a best-supporting nod for 1971's "The French Connection," in which he played the police partner of Oscar-winner Gene Hackman, and a best-actor nomination for 1979's "All That Jazz," the semi-autobiographical Bob Fosse film.
But he was perhaps best known for his role as a small-town police chief in Steven Spielberg's 1975 film "Jaws," about a killer shark terrorizing beachgoers - as well as millions of moviegoers.
In 2005, one of Scheider's most famous lines in the movie - "You're gonna need a bigger boat" - was voted No. 35 on the American Film Institute's list of best quotes from U.S. movies.
Widely hailed as the film that launched the era of the Hollywood blockbuster, "Jaws" was the first movie to earn $100 million at the box office.
"I've been fortunate to do what I consider three landmark films," he told The Associated Press in 1986. "'The French Connection' spawned a whole era of the relationship between two policemen, based on an enormous amount of truth about working on the job."
'"Jaws' was the first big, blockbuster outdoor-adventure film. And, certainly 'All That Jazz' is not like any old MGM musical. Each one of these films is unique, and I consider myself fortunate to be associated with them."
Born into a working class family in Orange, N.J., he was stricken with rheumatic fever at six. He spent long periods in bed, becoming a voracious reader. Except for a slight heart murmur, he was pronounced cured at 17. He acquired the distinctive shape of his nose in an amateur boxing match.
After three years in the Air Force, Scheider sought a New York theatre career in 1960. His debut came a year later as Mercutio in the New York Shakespeare Festival's production of "Romeo and Juliet." He also played minor roles in such films as "Paper Lion" and "Stiletto." Then he made a breakthrough in 1971 as Jane Fonda's pimp in "Klute."
"He was a wonderful guy. He was what I call 'a knockaround actor,' " Richard Dreyfuss, who co-starred with Scheider and Robert Shaw in "Jaws," said Sunday.
"A 'knockaround actor' to me is a compliment that means a professional that lives the life of a professional actor and doesn't' yell and scream at the fates and does his job and does it as well as he can," Dreyfuss said.
Scheider's many film credits included "Marathon Man," as Dustin Hoffman's brother, and "Naked Lunch," David Cronenberg's adaptation of the novel by William S. Burroughs.
He also starred in "Jaws 2," which turned out not to be as successful as the original.
TV roles included "SeaQuest DSV" and "Third Watch."
More recently, he played the slick CEO of an insurance company that denies coverage to a young man dying of leukemia in Francis Ford Coppola's "The Rainmaker," and he appeared in the direct-to-video "Dracula II: Ascension" and "Dracula III: Legacy."
Scheider was also politically active. He participated in rallies protesting U.S. military action in Iraq, including a massive New York demonstration in March 2003 that police said drew 125,000 chanting activists.
Scheider had a home built for him and his family in 1994 in Sagaponack in the Hamptons on New York's Long Island, where he was active in community issues. Last summer, Scheider announced that he was selling the home for about US$18.75 million and moving to the nearby village of Sag Harbor.
Although "Jaws" frightened some moviegoers out of the water for years, Scheider said in 1986 that he considered his role somewhat comedic.
"If you go back and look at the way it's developed and built, that is really a funny character," he said. "He's a fumbler with all kinds of inhibitions and fears - that's the way we built that character."
- Jacob Adelman in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
(THE CANADIAN PRESS)
R.I.P. ROY
February 5, 2008
Barry Morse
Veteran theatre and television actor on both sides of the Atlantic who won fame in The Fugitive
From 1963 to 1967 as the implacable Lieutenant Gerard, Barry Morse relentlessly pursued David Janssen in The Fugitive, in an American television series that kept viewers on tenterhooks worldwide (he finally got his man.)
Behind that television success lay training at RADA, where he had held the Leverhulme Scholarship, 1935-36; 200 roles from 1937 to 1941 in repertory companies at Croydon, Leeds, Bradford, Coventry, York, Sunderland, Newcastle and Harrogate; leading roles including Hamlet and Hippolytus on the radio; appearances in films including Thunder Rock (1942), When We Are Married (1943) and Mrs Fitzherbert (1947), and a variety of parts in the West End and on tour, including Ninian Fraser with Marie Tempest and A. E. Matthews in St John Ervine’s The First Mrs Fraser; Andrey in War and Peace; Lord Henry Wootton in The Picture of Dorian Gray; and Mephistopheles in Faust.
He had also appeared in television productions at Alexandra Palace, an aberration for which A. E. Matthews had castigated him, saying that the box was a rich man’s toy: “It’ll be forgotten by Christmas.”
In 1951 Morse moved to Canada, where his wife, the actress Sydney Sturgess, had family. Arriving in Montreal with a letter of introduction from Val Gielgud, head of BBC drama, he was soon in demand at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; and when CBC embraced television, Morse found himself playing a wide range of roles. In Macbeth he insisted on being paid one dollar more than CBC’s previous top television salary of $1,000, thus establishing actors’ right to negotiate with a corporation whose payment to artists was regulated by Parliament.
Morse was also among the earliest students on CBC’s training course for television directors and mounted a television production of Louis MacNeice’s radio play Christopher Columbus with the actors reading from autocues, a device which, as an actor, he would increasingly use as often as he was allowed when working in television. His television directing was later limited to such episodes of The Fugitive in which he was not overburdened as Lieutenant Gerard.
In the summer of 1959, billed as “Canada’s leading actor”, he gave a Benedick of immense vitality to the Beatrice of Rosemary Harris in Much Ado About Nothing at the open air theatre at Wellesley College. Two seasons at Wellesley had included Man and Superman, edited by Morse and the play’s director, Jerome Kilty, to within three hours. Seven years later, when invited to take over the fledgling Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake, he revived the enterprise, this time directing as well as giving his Jack Tanner. With the theatre filled beyond capacity, and with Morse and other leading Canadian actors accepting no more than a flat $150 per week, Morse was able, in five weeks, to pay off the deficit which, after two seasons, had nearly put paid to the festival. It now fills three theatres for most of the year.
Since that season came in a break between episodes of The Fugitive, the modest salary represented no hardship for Morse. Yet, as his later barnstorming tours for charity showed, there can be no doubt about his zest for pioneering and, theatrically, living rough.
Nor can there be any doubt about his devotion to Shaw. After his return in 1976 to part-domicile in London, he became vice-president of the Shaw Society and, on the death of Ellen Pollock 20 years later, was elected the society’s president. He gave as much consideration to preparing his inaugural presidential address as he did to any of the film and television jobs for which he continued to be well paid in his late seventies. In 2000, to mark the 50th anniversary of Shaw’s death, Morse played Shaw in a BBC radio dramatisation of correspondence between Shaw and the boxer Gene Tunney. Two years later came a play based on the correspondence between Shaw and Lord Alfred Douglas — Shaw’s paternal posture in the relationship gaining force from the casting of Morse’s son, Hayward, as Douglas.
Morse appeared in a variety of British television series, including The Golden Bowl, but he continued to do most of his work in North America. He directed both Salad Days and Staircase for Broadway, where he also played the title role in Hadrian VII, then going with the play to Australia. For much of 1980 he was involved in a project to build a Shakespeare Globe Theatre on Vancouver Island, without success. Perhaps it was to the good: his wit and intelligence made him a natural Shavian; but, to judge by the Oedipus which he gave alongside the Benedick and Jack Tanner in 1959, a certain impatience — which may have masked fear of his own darker forces — prevented him from seeking within himself the poetic and emotional depths that the great Shakespeare roles demand.
Morse raised money for the Performing Arts Lodge, an actors’ and musicians’ retirement home in Toronto, touring his one man show, Merely Players in one-night stands through Canada in 1983 and 1987-88. In 1997 two performances of the show raised $50,000 for the Parkinson Foundation, to which he devoted much energy after his wife developed the disease. His last performance of Merely Players was in 2003. If, at 85, he lacked the panache of earlier years, his playing of an Irish peasant woman’s reminiscence was an object lesson in the interpreter’s self- effacement in service to his text; and it made a moving farewell.
His wife died in 1991 and his daughter in 2005. He is survived by his son.
Barry Morse, actor, was born on June 10, 1919. He died on February 2, 2008, aged 88
The Times Online
Have your say
The most hated man on tv as Lt.Gerard getting thumped by little old ladies in supermakets say "you leave that nice Dr Kimble alone"
Was good fun as Prof Victor Bergman in Space 1999
Russell Buer, Exmouth, UK
Barry was not only a fine actor but a good friend who would do anything to help. He was a regular visitor to Soho and had many friends outside the acting profession. His wit and gentle manners will be sorely missed by all the gang at Gerry's.
John O'Connell, London, UK
Barry Morse was a wonderful and skillful actor - his wife Sydney used to say that he "had blotting paper for brains" in his head because of his great ability to learn his lines quickly and easily. As co-author of "Remember with Advantages: Chasing The Fugitive and Other Stories from an Actor's Life" (McFarland and Company, 2007), I had the pleasure of working with Barry on this autobiography as well as a number of stage, television and radio productions. He never spoke of 'autocues' nor used the device on any production with which I was involved. I would also like to correct two dates from the piece: Sydney Sturgess died from Parkinson's disease in 1999, and Barry Morse was born on June 10, 1918. He therefore was 89 years of age at the time of his death.
Anthony Wynn, Portland, Oregon, USA
(Proof that The Times is always on time - but not always accurate.)
Very sad to read Barry has died - a familiar face of 1960's and 1970's TV in the US and UK. In particular The Fugitive and Space 1999.
Barry very kindly replied to me in 2004 when I was writing a biography about the late great actor Richard Wattis. He stated that he had never known or worked with Richard, but knew through the actiors grapevine that he was highly respected throughout the entertainemnt industry.
Praise indeed from another great actor. RIP Barry.
Ian Payne, Walsall, West midlands
Aye, I echo and second that; R.I.P. Mr. Morse.
+++
15-Year-Old Charged With Killing Family
Source:
The Associated Press
Posted: 02/03/08 3:12PM
Filed Under: Crime Files
COCKEYSVILLE, Md. (AP) - A 15-year-old boy was charged with murder Sunday in the shooting deaths of his parents and two younger brothers in their suburban Baltimore home.
The Maryland police rep speaks to the press. (AP Photo)Nicholas Waggoner Browning was charged with four counts of first-degree murder in the slayings of his father, John Browning, 45; his mother Tamara, 44; and his brothers Gregory, 13, and Benjamin, 11. He was charged as an adult.
Browning was arrested at 1:05 a.m. Sunday after he admitted to the killings, Baltimore County Police spokesman Bill Toohey said.
The teen had not been getting along with his father, police said in a news release. On Friday night, he went into the house after other family members were asleep and shot each of them using his father's handgun, which was in the house, police said.
After the slayings, he threw the gun away in bushes near his house, police said. The gun has been recovered, Toohey said.
Browning then spent Friday night and all day Saturday with friends, Toohey said. When the friends took him back to his house at 5 p.m. Saturday, Browning went into the house and came back out to say that his father was dead. He called 911.
Police officers found Browning's father dead in a ground-floor room and the bodies of his mother and brothers in upstairs bedrooms. There was no sign of a confrontation, Toohey said.
Browning was denied bail Sunday morning; bail review was scheduled Monday at District Court in Towson. He was being held at the Baltimore County Detention Center in a special section for juveniles.
Toohey said he didn't know whether Browning had a lawyer.
Even if convicted as an adult of first-degree murder, Browning is too young under state law to face the death penalty.
Two of Nicholas Browning's fellow students drove past the family's house Sunday afternoon. They started to weep when told by reporters that Browning was charged in the slayings.
"It's hard to believe someone could do this," said Brooke Kebaugh, 16.
Liz Lazlawbach, 17, said Browning complained about fighting with his father, but "not about anything violent."
The grounds of the two-story home were neat and neighbor Mike Thomas said the Brownings would even pick up trash along the street.
"These people would do anything in the world for you - just incredible people," Thomas said.
Neighbors called each other throughout the night to discuss the killings, Thomas said.
He said one of his sons had been in Boy Scouts with one of the Brownings' sons and was devastated when he learned of the deaths. Thomas said he recently sold Browning a trailer that Browning planned to use for Boy Scout outings, and it was still parked in the Brownings' driveway Sunday.
John Browning was an attorney and partner at Royston, Mueller, McLean & Reid.
Counselors were to be available Monday to meet with students at Dulaney High, said Charles Herndon, a county school spokesman. He declined to say where Browning's younger brothers went to school.
More on this story, with commentary, here.
Not sure how this family can "rest in peace" now, after having been assassinated by one of their own... Reminds me, of course, of the Amityville Horror...
Still, may they rest in peace - somehow.
And may God Have Mercy on that teenager's soul...
Or swiftly punish him.
His Will Be Done.
+++
Mom Said Baby 'Fit Right in' Microwave
Source: The Associated Press
Posted: 02/01/08 3:05PM
Filed Under: Crime Files
DAYTON, Ohio (AP) - A former cellmate of a woman accused of killing her month-old baby by burning the girl in a microwave testified Thursday that the woman confessed to the crime, saying the baby "fit right in" the oven.
New Twist in Microwave Baby Case
Mother Innocent of Horrific Charges?
Judge John Kessler declared a mistrial in the sensational case after hearing testimony privately from a juvenile who said he was at the apartment complex of defendant China Arnold on the night her infant died in August 2005. Arnold is seen on a television screen during a video arraignment, Nov. 28, 2006, in Dayton, Ohio.
Linda Williams testified that she developed a sexual relationship with defendant China Arnold when the two were cellmates in the Montgomery County jail in March.
Arnold confided in her about what happened to her baby, Wiliams said.
Arnold feared that her boyfriend believed he wasn't the child's father and that he was going to leave her, Williams told the jury.
"She said she put the baby into the microwave and started it and left the house," Williams said.
Williams said she asked Arnold how she got the child into the oven.
"She said she fit right in," Williams said.
Sitting at the defense table, the 27-year-old Arnold showed little emotion as her trial got under way in the August 2005 death of Paris Talley at their Dayton home.
Under cross-examination by defense attorney Jon Paul Rion, Williams acknowledged that she met with detectives after the alleged conversation and told them Arnold had said she didn't know how the baby died.
Williams, who has since been released from jail, said she lied to detectives in that initial interview because she had feelings for Arnold.
In his opening statement, Rion said: "The evidence is going to show that she did not purposely take the life of her own baby."
Rion said that other people had access to the baby, that Arnold was intoxicated to the point of blacking out when the child died and that people questioned about the case changed their stories. Rion also raised questions about the reliability of the science when it comes to determining the effect of microwaves on humans.
Thermal burns on the baby were different from those that would have been suffered from a fire, electrical shock, hot water, an iron or chemicals, said Russell Uptegrove, a forensic pathologist with the Montgomery County coroner's office. It took him awhile to consider that the burns might have come from a microwave oven, he said.
"It was so heinous to think of that, that I couldn't convince myself it was a real possibility," Uptegrove said.
DNA recovered from the ceiling of the oven matched that of the baby, he said.
During the opening statement by Assistant Montgomery County Prosecutor Daniel Brandt, a photo of the burned baby was flashed on a screen for the 12-member jury to see. Arnold sat quietly, occasionally jotting notes on a yellow legal pad.
Brandt said Arnold killed the child after arguing with her boyfriend over whether they had been faithful to each other.
When the couple took the baby to the hospital, Brandt said, Arnold exclaimed: "'I killed my baby. I killed my baby."'
Brandt said Arnold later told police it never would have happened had she not gotten so drunk. He said Arnold, who has been in jail since she was charged in November 2006, told Williams she had killed the baby in the microwave and other inmates that she hadn't meant to do it.
Rion said Arnold, who has three sons, loved having a daughter and quit college and her job so she could stay home and take care of her. Rion said that Arnold's boyfriend was the father of the child, and that it couldn't have been anyone else.
For more DEMENTED comments on this revolting story - go here.
And may you despise a certain Don2Dust as much as I do!
If you don't - do not bother returning to the Lugubrious Blog.
Ever.
NHL Star's Throat Slashed by Skate
Source: The Associated Press
Posted: 02/11/08 1:55PM
Filed Under: Top News
BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) - Florida Panthers forward Richard Zednik required lifesaving surgery after severing his carotid artery, his agent told The Associated Press on Monday.
Scary Moment on the Ice
Florida Panthers forward Richard Zednik suffered a horrific injury during a game against the Buffalo Sabres on Sunday night. Zednik's neck was slashed by a teammate's skate, causing a deep gash which required surgery to close.Zednik had surgery Sunday night and was in stable condition at a Buffalo hospital after losing a significant amount of blood during the game at Buffalo earlier in the day, agent David Schatia said. Schatia didn't have further details because he had just arrived in Montreal following a trip oversees.
Zednik was sliced across the right side of the throat by teammate Olli Jokinen's skate in a frightening accident midway through the third period of Buffalo's 5-3 victory.
Canada's Sportsnet cable-TV network reported on its Web site that the skate blade just missed cutting the jugular vein.
The Panthers returned home to South Florida following the game. They did not have an immediate update on the player's condition or details of the severity of the injury.
Zednik was circling the net behind the play and skating into the corner just when Jokinen was upended by Sabres forward Clarke MacArthur. Jokinen fell headfirst to the ice, and his right leg and skate flew up and struck Zednik directly on the side of the neck.
Clutching his neck, Zednik left a trail of blood as he somehow had the capacity to race three-quarters the length of the ice to the Panthers bench. He nearly fell into the arms of trainer Dave Zenobi, who immediately placed a towel on the player's throat. With the help of defenseman Jassen Cullimore, Zednik was escorted up the tunnel behind the bench and loaded into an ambulance.
Zednik, a 12-year veteran, is in his first season with the Panthers. The team made arrangements to have his wife, Jessica, fly from South Florida to Buffalo by a charter flight Sunday night. Zenobi and assistant general manager Randy Sexton also stayed behind to be with Zednik, the Panthers said.
When Zednik was with Montreal he sustained a severe concussion, broken nose, bruised throat and cut eyelid following a vicious blow to the face by Boston's Kyle McLaren during the 2002 playoffs.
Zednik was knocked cold, had to be taken off the ice on a stretcher and spent the night in intensive care.
McLaren was suspended by the NHL for the rest of the Eastern Conference quarterfinals, missing the final two games of the series, which Montreal won in six games.
Zednik returned the following season to score a career-high 31 goals and match a career high with 50 points.
"I saw him when they carted him to the hospital and said, `Oh, my god. I'd be surprised if this guy ever walks again,'" Schatia said. "He's a tough guy."
Zednik signed with the Panthers as a free agent last summer. After a two-month slump, he has been playing well. He entered the game on a four-game point streak, in which he had six goals and three assists, giving him 26 points (15 goals, 11 assists) in 54 games this season.
Richard Zednik did NOT die - but this is lugubrious enough to merit an entry here still...
This must be the CURSE OF THE BUFFALO (pronounce "buff-a-loooow" please!) for the last time something like this occurred, I do believe it was against the Sabres again... Goalie Clint Malarchuk had seen his carotid sliced and a geyser of blood was splurting out there too...
Now, Malarchuk was a GOALTENDER. To have him in contact with opposing players at ice level, so that he'd in proximity to their skates, is normal. It is why goalies are so well-padded in the first place and it is a miracle that such accidents do not occur more often...
But Zednik - how in blue blazes was he in a position to have his neck sliced by a skate?!? And not even an opponent's skate bu a TEAMMATE's...?!?
Moronic, Zednik - very moronic!
You don't seem to know which way is up! Pathetic.
I don't know how you can score any goals at all...
Well, I hope that this time you've had enough - and that you'll hang up YOUR skates... for good.
On or just around the corner or rather that day which is is supposed to be the celebration of love in most parts (save, perhaps, Romania - they have their own day for that, the 24th) - well, we get such headlines that leave little doubt that there is very little love in the world:
* In the News
As of 5:12 a.m. EST
• Authorities uncover plot to assassinate Philippine president
• East Timor president walked into gunfight
State of emergency
• Man hacks NYC psychologist to death with a meat cleaver
• Evidence exonerates mother incarcerated for daughter's death
• Obama, McCain look to maintain momentum after wins
• Yahoo! explores alliance with Murdoch's News Corp.
Yikes.
I'd rather post my mini-eulogy to the great HENRI SALVADOR instead, at this time - instead of delving any deeper into any of those headlines (particularly the one in bold...)
Aye, amazingly enough, the man who loved women passed away on the eve of the Feast of Love - a mere two months after retiring from show-business with one final show that celebrated his 90th birthday...
Henri Salvador, Singer Who Helped Bring Rock To France, Dies at 90
By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Published: February 14, 2008
PARIS (Agence France-Presse) — Henri Salvador, a French crooner who first went on stage in the cabarets of prewar Paris, played guitar with Django Reinhardt and helped introduce rock ’n’ roll to France, died at his home in Paris on Wednesday. He was 90.
Skip to next paragraph
Pierre Verdy/Associated Press
Henri Salvador in 1982.
The cause was a brain hemorrhage, according to his record label, Polydor, which announced his death. Mr. Salvador had appeared on stage until the end of last year and planned a new album this year, Polydor said.
Popular for generations in France, Mr. Salvador sang jazz, blues, rock ’n’ roll and chanson Française, traditional French pop. He also had a large following in Brazil and was credited with being an inspiration for the bossa nova sound. Its inventor, Antonio Carlos Jobim, acknowledged that hearing the Salvador song “Dans Mon Île” (“In My Island”) gave him the idea of slowing down samba’s fast beat and introducing more melody.
Born to middle-class parents in French Guiana in 1917, Mr. Salvador spent 73 years entertaining audiences with a mix of raucous hoofing, gags and jazz-inspired chanson.
Early in his career, while mixing comedy, singing and guitar playing in Paris nightclubs, he was spotted by Mr. Reinhardt, the jazz guitarist, who took him on as an accompanist. Mr. Salvador also played the guitar with the jazz violinist Eddie South.
During World War II, while appearing on the French Riviera, he was recruited by the French bandleader Ray Ventura and toured with him as a novelty musician in South America after Mr. Ventura, who was Jewish, fled Vichy France, the wartime regime that collaborated with the Nazis.
After the war Mr. Salvador established himself in Paris as a songwriter and performer. In 1956 he crossed the Atlantic to perform twice on Ed Sullivan’s television variety show. Inspired by the new sounds sweeping the United States, he teamed up with the French songwriter Boris Vian to make some of France’s first rock ’n’ roll hits, including “Rock and Roll Mops.”
Mr. Vian and Mr. Salvador collaborated on more than 400 songs in a variety of styles, from blues to French Caribbean beguines. In the 1960s Mr. Salvador had a series of novelty hits accompanied by humorous film clips that were a precursor of music videos.
He remained in the public eye with television variety shows, concerts and a stream of albums. The latest, “Reverence,” came out in 2006.
His second wife and manager, Jacqueline Garabedian, died in 1976. He is survived by his fourth wife, Catherine Costa, The Times of London said.
Free trial. Read the complete New York edition of The Times on computer, just as it appears in print.
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* Kirk Browning, 86, Dies; Put the Arts on TV (February 13, 2008)
* Chris Anderson, 81, Influential Jazz Pianist, Is Dead (February 9, 2008)
* Tata Güines, 77, Cuban Conga-Drum Master (February 7, 2008)
* Pete Candoli, 84, Trumpeter and Studio Musician (January 23, 2008)
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R.I.P. HENRI SALVADOR
France's first crooner in many ways - Brasil's PROUA
All at once France's own Sammy Davis Jr and, in Brasil, the Pele of music!
Another irreplaceable talent gone to Heaven...
They have a "killer choir" up there now...!
+++
Adventurer Steve Fossett declared dead
By TAMMY WEBBER,
Associated Press Writer
6 minutes ago
CHICAGO - Millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett, who risked his life seeking to set records in high-tech balloons, gliders and jets, was declared dead Friday, 5 months after he vanished while flying in an ordinary small plane.
The self-made business tycoon, who in 2002 became the first person to circle the world solo in a balloon, was last seen Sept. 3 after taking off in a single-engine plane from an airstrip near Yerington, Nev., heading toward Bishop, Calif. He was 63.
At the request of his wife, Peggy V. Fossett, a judge declared Fossett legally dead in Cook County Circuit Court as a step toward resolving the legal status of his estate, said her attorney, Michael LoVallo.
Judge Jeffrey Malak heard testimony Friday from Peggy Fossett, a family friend and a search-and-rescue expert before deciding there was sufficient evidence to declare him dead.
"It was very sad," LoVallo said, "and at first she hoped and sort of envisioned him walking down the road the next day with another story to tell. But as the days went on, she realized it wasn't going to happen as it had on other occasions when he'd had close calls."
While flight records brought him his greatest fame, Fossett, who was paunchy for most of his life, also climbed some of the world's best-known peaks, including the Matterhorn in Switzerland and Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. (Everest did elude him.) With top notch endurance and concentration, he swam the English Channel and completed the Boston Marathon, the Ironman Triathlon, the Iditarod dog sled race, and, as part of a team, the 24 Hours of Le Mans car race.
"Steve's lived his life to the full, and he hasn't wasted a minute of his life," Fossett's rival-turned-comrade, British billionaire Sir Richard Branson, had said as the search went on. "Everything he's done, he's taken a calculated risk with."
But Fossett was on a pleasure flight when he vanished and not looking for a dry lake bed to use as a surface on which to set the world land speed record, as was initially reported, according to his wife's petition.
Dozens of planes and helicopters spent more than a month searching the rugged western Nevada mountains before the effort was called off as winter approached.
The search area covered 20,000 square miles, and according to the Reno Gazette-Journal, about 15 to 20 private planes have vanished in the area since 1950. In 2005, wreckage was found in Kings Canyon National Park from a plane that went down during World War II.
LoVallo said Mrs. Fossett would like to recover the remains "and really find out what happened." Plans are to resume a recovery search in the spring.
A Stanford University graduate with a master's degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Fossett went to Chicago to work in investments and founded his own firm, Marathon Securities. The fortune he amassed allowed him to take his childhood fascination with exploration to extremes — he once said he drew up a list of feats he wanted to accomplish and started checking them off.
"Business is much easier for me," he told The Washington Post in a 1987 interview. "Sports is often very humiliating, because there are so many better athletes in these events. I would like to be the best in everything, but that's not possible. I risk humiliation because I have a genuine interest in participating."
In 2004, Fossett and his crew broke the round-the-world sailing record by six days. He even set world records for cross-country skis, according to his Web site.
But he was best known for his aerial exploits, first in ballooning, more recently in airplanes.
Beginning in the 1980s, teams led by Fossett, Branson and others used steadily improving technology to try to best each other and their predecessors in a series of ever-longer balloon flights. In January 1997 alone, there were three failed attempts, including a solo attempt by Fossett and a try by a crew led by Branson, the flashy founder of Virgin Atlantic Airways.
In 2002, after years of trying, Fossett became the first person to fly nonstop around the world alone in a balloon, setting the record on his sixth attempt. It took him two weeks to float 19,428.6 miles around the Southern Hemisphere.
Three years later, in March 2005, he was first to fly a plane solo around the world without stopping or refueling, covering 23,000 miles in 67 hours in the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer jet.
Solo flights represent the ultimate challenge, he told The Associated Press when the GlobalFlyer was introduced in 2004.
"They become more of an endurance endeavor, and become focused on the ability and the performance of a single person," he said.
Fossett made nearly as many headlines for his narrow escapes as he did for his successes. In 1998, during one of his solo around-the-world attempts, his balloon ripped during a storm, sending him plunging 29,000 feet into the Coral Sea. Falling at about 2,500 feet per minute, Fossett blacked out.
He said his next memory was "waking up with the capsule upside down, half full of water and on fire."
He was fished out by the crew of a schooner and was still on the ship when Branson called to invite him on another round-the-world attempt later that year, this time as part of a team. It ended in another dramatic rescue.
Branson, Fossett and Swedish balloonist Per Lindstrand made it more than halfway before poor wind conditions forced them to ditch in the shark-infested waters off Honolulu on Christmas Day 1998. The Coast Guard spent about $130,000 sending planes, helicopters and a boat to rescue the trio.
Fossett pressed on because of his thirst for accomplishments, and for all his close calls, those who knew him well said he wasn't reckless. Fossett once said the most dangerous thing he ever did was fall off his bicycle in Chicago without a helmet on.
"I'm doing these things for personal accomplishment, not the thrills," he told Stanford's alumni magazine in 1997, after his second around-the-world balloon attempt ended in India. "I don't do these things because I have a death wish."
Many of Fossett's recent adventures were financed with help from Branson, who is now teaming with renowned aerospace designer Burt Rutan to begin sending paying civilians into space within a few years.
As high as he flew, Fossett had no desire to take a ride into space.
"I really wouldn't want to go unless I get to be the pilot," Fossett told the AP in 2007. "I'm not a passenger type of person."
Born in Jackson, Tenn., in 1944, Fossett grew up in Garden Grove, Calif., and climbed his first mountain as a 12-year-old Boy Scout and got his pilot's license in college.
On a fraternity dare in 1965, his senior year at Stanford, he swam to Alcatraz and tried to hang a "Beat Cal" banner on the wall of the island prison, which had closed two years earlier.
"I got it up there, briefly," he told the alumni magazine. "Then a security guard pushed me offshore. Luckily, my frat brothers were following behind me in a fishing boat with a keg of beer."
Fossett was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in July. He told a crowd gathered at the Dayton Convention Center in Ohio that he would continue flying and planned to go to Argentina later in the year in an effort to break a glider record.
"I imagine that when I'm 80 years old and sitting in a wheelchair that I might do something like take a remote control airplane and try and flight it around the world," he told CNN last year. "I plan to be setting and breaking records indefinitely."
___
Associated Press writer Joe Danborn in New York contributed to this report.
___
On the Net:
http://www.stevefossett.com/
R.I.P. Steve Fossett
If you are truly dead...
Campus stunned by N. Illinois shooting
By DON BABWIN,
Associated Press Writer
Fri Feb 15, 5:25 AM ET
DEKALB, Ill. - Word of the ambush attack inside a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University on Thursday sent panic throughout the sprawling campus.
Jerry Santoni was in a back row of the hall when he saw a man walk onto the stage and open fire.
"I saw him shoot one round at the teacher," Santoni said. "After that, I proceeded to get down as fast as I could."
Santoni dived down, hitting his head on the seat in front of him with such violence that it left a knot on his forehead. Then he fled Cole Hall.
Authorities said the intruder, a former student wielding a shotgun and two handguns, killed five people and wounded more than a dozen others before killing himself.
Senior Ashley Dallman said she was in an acting class in a neighboring building when several students from Cole Hall came running in. Her professors locked the doors and they listened to news reports on the radio for about an hour before school officials told them they could leave.
"We all started crying," she said. "We didn't know what to do. It was a very intense moment."
Police said they got to the hall within two minutes of the 3 p.m. shooting. Alan Edrinn, 21, a journalism major from Matteson, Ill., arrived outside Cole Hall a half hour later.
"It was very chaotic. People were definitely in a panic," Edrinn said. "I saw bodies on the sidewalk, it looked like two, people were attending to them."
The campus was eerily quiet Thursday night. All the lights were on in the library — about 200 yards from the crime-scene tape that surrounded Cole Hall — but the seats inside sat empty.
Fliers offering counseling services were posted around campus residence halls, where puffy-eyed students pulled luggage for trips home and kept their cell phones close at hand.
Mike MacQueen's phone brought no comfort.
"I just got a text message that a friend of mine passed away," the 20-year-old from Elmhurst said. "He was a good person, he didn't deserve to die."
"It's surreal, this happening so close to home," he said.
Tracy Knuth, a 23-year-old senior, saw dozens of ambulances swarm onto the scene. "Everyone is completely and utterly freaked out," Knuth said by phone from her apartment.
Knuth said a large number of courses are taught at Cole Hall, from undergraduate math and science to liberal arts courses; she said the hall has two or three large lecture auditoriums that can each accommodate about 500 students.
"Everyone is scared to go to classes next week," she said.
All classes were canceled Thursday night and the 25,000-student campus was closed on Friday.
Freshman Monica DeFrancesco initially thought about heading home to her parents' house after the shooting, but decided to stay in her dorm room in Douglas Hall, a 10-minute walk from Cole Hall.
"There's a lot of security," said DeFrancesco, who didn't see the shootings or know anyone involved. "They're checking your bags and your IDs ... I feel very comfortable."
___
Associated Press writers Martha Irvine, Michael Tarm and Carla K. Johnson contributed to this report.
NIU gunman stopped taking medication
By DEANNA BELLANDI,
Associated Press Writer
DEKALB, Ill. - If there is such a thing as a profile of a mass murderer, Stephen Kazmierczak didn't fit it: outstanding student, engaging, polite and industrious, with what looked like a bright future in the criminal justice field.
And yet on Thursday, the 27-year-old Kazmierczak, armed with three handguns and a brand-new pump-action shotgun he had carried onto campus in a guitar case, stepped from behind a screen on the stage of a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University and opened fire on a geology class. He killed five students before committing suicide.
University Police Chief Donald Grady said, without giving details, that Kazmierczak had become erratic in the past two weeks after he had stopped taking his medication. But that seemed to come as news to many of those who knew him, and the attack itself was positively baffling.
"We had no indications at all this would be the type of person that would engage in such activity," Grady said. He described the gunman as a good student during his time at NIU, and by all accounts a "fairly normal" person.
Exactly what set Kazmierczak off — and why he picked his former university and that particular lecture hall — remained a mystery. Police said they found no suicide note.
Investigators learned that a week ago, on Feb. 8, Kazmierczak walked into a Champaign, gun store and picked up two guns — the Remington shotgun and a Glock 9mm handgun. He bought the two other handguns at the same shop — a Hi-Point 380 on Dec. 30 and a Sig Sauer on Aug. 6.
All four guns were bought legally from a federally licensed firearms dealer, said Thomas Ahern, an agency spokesman. At least one criminal background check was performed. Kazmierczak (pronounced kaz-MUR-chek) had no criminal record.
Kazmierczak had a State Police-issued FOID, or firearms owners identification card, which is required in Illinois to own a gun, authorities said. Such cards are rarely issued to those with recent mental health problems. The application asks: "In the past five years have you been a patient in any medical facility or part of any medical facility used primarily for the care or treatment of persons for mental illness?"
Kazmierczak, who went by Steve, graduated from NIU in 2007 and was a graduate student in sociology there before leaving last year and moving on to the graduate school of social work at the University of Illinois in Champaign, 130 miles away.
Unlike Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui — a sullen misfit who could barely look anyone in the eye, much less carry on a conversation — Kazmierczak appeared to fit in just fine.
Chris Larrison, an assistant professor of social work, said Kazmierczak did data entry for Larrison's research grant on mental health clinics. Larrison was stunned by the shooting rampage, as was the gunman's faculty adviser, professor Jan Carter-Black.
"He was engaging, motivated, responsible. I saw nothing to suggest that there was anything troubling about his behavior," she said.
Carter-Black said Kazmierczak wanted to focus on mental health issues and enrolled in August in a course she taught about human behavior and the social environment, but withdrew in September because he had gotten a job with the prison system. He recently left the job and resumed classes full-time in January, Carter-Black said.
His University of Illinois student ID depicts a smiling, clean-cut Kazmierczak, unlike the scowling, menacing-looking images of Cho that surfaced after his rampage.
NIU President John Peters said Kazmierczak compiled "a very good academic record, no record of trouble" at the 25,000-student campus in DeKalb. He won at least two awards and served as an officer in two student groups dedicated to promoting understanding of the criminal justice system.
Exactly what sort of career he planned for himself was unclear. But he wrote papers on self-injury in prison and the role of religion in the creation of early U.S. prisons. The research paper on self-injury in prison said his interests also included political violence and peace and social justice.
Speaking Friday in Lakeland, Fla., Kazmierczak's distraught father did not immediately provide any clues to what led to the bloodshed.
"Please leave me alone. ... This is a very hard time for me," Robert Kazmierczak told reporters, throwing his arms up and weeping after emerging briefly from his house. He declined further comment about his son and went back inside his house, saying he was diabetic. A sign on the front door said: "Illini fans live here."
Neighbors in the brick apartment building in Champaign where Kazmierczak last lived were shocked to hear he was the gunman.
"It's not possible," said Maurice Darling, 80, who lives in an adjacent second-floor apartment. "He seemed to be much too nice."
He said the tall, thin and bespectacled Kazmierczak shared the apartment with a woman and neither showed any sign of anger or aggression. "They were friendly, agreeable — just like any neighbor would be," she said.
Chelsea Thrash, a 25-year-old waitress who lives with her 3-year-old daughter in the apartment directly beneath Kazmierczak's, said he was always up late and there was frequently a lot of "trampling" noise coming through the hardwood floor. She went up and knocked on the door once recently at 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. to request quiet and he said through the closed door, "Oh, I'm sorry — I dropped my weight."
"It's kind of creepy," she said. "I never thought someone in this tiny corner of southwest Champaign would ever dream of that, let alone carry it out, and have that above me and my daughter."
Kazmierczak grew up in the Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village, not far from O'Hare Airport. His family lived most recently in a middle-class neighborhood of mostly one-story tract homes before moving away early in this decade. His mother died in Florida in 2006 at age 58.
He was a B student at Elk Grove High School, where school district spokeswoman Venetia Miles said he was active in band and took Japanese before graduating in 1998. He was also in the chess club.
At NIU, six white crosses were placed on a snow-covered hill around the center of campus, which was closed Friday. They included the names of four victims — Daniel Parnmenter, Ryanne Mace, Julianna Gehant, Catalina Garcia. The two other crosses were blank, though officials have identified Kazmierczak's final victim as Gayle Dubowski.
Allyse Jerome, 19, a sophomore from Schaumburg, recalled how the gunman, dressed in black and a stocking cap, burst through a stage door in 200-seat Cole Hall just before class was about to let out. He squeezed off more than 50 shots as screaming students ran and crawled for cover.
"Honestly, at first everyone thought it was a joke," Jerome said. Everyone hit the floor, she said. Then she got up and ran, but tripped. She said she felt like "an open target."
"He could've decided to get me," Jerome said. "I thought for sure he was going to get me."
___
Associated Press writers Don Babwin, Caryn Rousseau, Ashley M. Heher, Dave Carpenter, Carla K. Johnson, Lindsey Tanner, David Mercer, Nguyen Huy Vu, Michael Tarm, Mike Robinson and Anthony McCartney in Lakeland, Fla., contributed to this report, along with the AP News Research Center in New York.
My condolences to the families of the victims from this latest campus shooting tragedy.
This seems to be about to become an epidemic throughout North America - particularly the USA...
May the souls of all these shooting victims find PEACE and their way to the Light still, despite the extremely violent circumstances of their sudden departure from this world...
Amen
+++
Kon Ichikawa, Japanese Film Director, Dies at 92
DOUGLAS MARTIN reporting
Mr. Ichikawa’s versatility ranged beyond his well-known antiwar dramas like “The Burmese Harp” and “Fires on the Plain” to comedies, documentaries and literary adaptations.
(...)
Remembering Jess Cain
By Bob Oakes
BOSTON, Mass. - February 15, 2008 - From 1957, Jess Cain shook up the radio waves in Boston and beyond.
On the commercial AM station, WHDH, Cain made mornings fun. For 34 years, he entertained his listeners with songs, parodies, and skits. He was the first to do all that, and it made him a household name from Cape Cod to Canada.
Jess Cain died of cancer Thursday at the age of 81.
(www.wbur.org)
(...)
Nation's oldest West Point graduate dies
Fri Feb 15 1:18pm EST
BREWSTER, Mass. -- The man who had been the oldest living graduate of the United States Military Academy has died.
(...)
And among the less "important" and more "everyman" of them, a 62 year-old cancer patient from Chicoutimi, QC, Canada, who had but DAYS to live (or so he was told by the doctors, up there on the third floor, in the palliative care unit) and he had but to lay down and await the reaper to come...
Alas, he knew that his wait would be rife with atrocious pain - plus, most likely, the doctors were off their mark and it would not be only a mere few days but a week or more of that pain...
And so he chose to end his days right there and then.
He threw himself from the balcony from that third floor - and died on impact.
My condolences to all the bereaved affected here.
May the Chicoutimi man be forgiven for ending his days and may he find the peace that he does deserve.
As for the other three deceased ones - since they are illuminaries, googling their name will unearth all the other details you may want regarding them.
May they too R.I.P.
of course.
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8 killed as car hits Md. drag-race crowd
By STEPHEN MANNING,
Associated Press Writer
ACCOKEEK, Md. - Police in Maryland say an eighth person has died after a car roared into a crowd that was watching a drag race on a highway.
Authorities say the driver accidentally drove into the crowd but he wasn't part of the race. The spectators had just watched two other cars speed off.
The accident happened about 20 miles from Washington on a divided highway in Accokeek (ack-oh-KEEK').
Seven people died at the scene. Police say the eighth died at a hospital. Six others were injured.
R.I.P. Accokeek Eight
+++
Pakistan election office blast kills 37
By MUNIR AHMAD,
Associated Press Writer
2 hours, 29 minutes ago
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - A suicide bomber rammed a car packed with explosives into an independent parliament candidate's election office in northwest Pakistan Saturday, killing 37 people and wounding more than 90 days before a crucial vote, government officials said.
Bodies were seen lying in pools of blood following the blast in Parachinar, a volatile tribal area bordering Afghanistan, one witness said.
In another area along that border, a second car bombing near a checkpoint killed two civilians and wounded eight security personnel, said army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas.
The candidate targeted, Syed Riaz Hussain, was unharmed in the first attack. Hussain is backed by the opposition Pakistan People's Party formerly led by the slain Benazir Bhutto. The party is challenging President Pervez Musharraf in parliamentary elections on Monday.
Most of the victims appeared to be members of the opposition PPP. They had gathered at the candidate's home following a campaign rally, said Mushtaq Hussain, an administrative official in the area.
He said a suicide bomber apparently "rammed his explosive-laden car into the election office."
Interior Ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema said 37 people were killed and more than 90 wounded when a suicide bomber drove into a crowd as they were preparing to eat.
Asked who could be behind the bombing, he said those "who want to derail the election process."
The injured poured into a nearby hospital, many in critical condition with severe burn wounds, said Raza Hussain, one of the doctors.
"Several of our party members are lying in a pool of blood," said Zafar Ali, a party supporter at the scene.
The attack came two days before elections considered crucial to restoring democracy in Pakistan after eight years of military rule under Musharraf.
Recent opinion polls show the opposition poised for a landslide victory amid disenchantment Musharraf's rule.
Monday's elections are taking place against a backdrop of rising Islamic militancy throughout Pakistan, and many candidates have been discouraged from holding large rallies. Security fears are highest in lawless tribal areas along the Afghan border.
The Dec. 27 assassination of opposition leader Bhutto and a string of suicide bombings — some targeting campaign rallies — have been blamed on al-Qaida- or Taliban-linked militants.
Also in the northwest Saturday, suspected militants bombed a polling station that badly damaged the building but caused no injuries.
In the southwestern city of Quetta, hundreds of police surrounded and then clashed with more than 1,500 supporters of a coalition of anti-Musharraf parties boycotting the vote, injuring seven.
The demonstrators threw rocks at police, who responded with tear gas before arresting 50 activists for the violence, police officer Raja Mohammed Ishtiaq said. A truck and three motorcycles were burned in the melee, and the street littered with party flags and shoes.
The government has deployed 81,000 soldiers to back up 392,000 police assigned to protect voters, said military spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas.
Musharraf said Saturday he was confident the elections would be free and fair and, hopefully, without violence.
"We will have a stable, democratically elected government and with the stable, democratically elected government we will ensure a successful fight against terrorism and extremism," he said in a speech to diplomats and senior government officials that ran on state-run Pakistan Television.
Although Musharraf is not up for re-election, he could face impeachment if the opposition wins a two-thirds majority in the legislature.
Opposition politicians fear the results will be manipulated in hopes of assuring the ruling party enough seats to block any impeachment.
"We know very well that elections are being rigged," former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, one of the president's sharpest critics, told reporters at his home in the eastern city of Lahore. "We are going to elections in an environment of cheating, fear and threats."
Kanwar Dilshad, the No. 2 official in Pakistan's Election Commission, insisted there would be no rigging.
"We are neutral. A level playing field has been provided to all the contesting candidates, and we are doing our job to ensure free, fair, transparent and peaceful elections," Dilshad told The Associated Press.
Last week, New York-based Human Rights Watch questioned the election commission's impartiality, saying it has ignored complaints of harassment against opposition candidates.
On Friday, Sen. Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat who heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the United States should consider cutting off military aid to Pakistan if the elections are rigged.
____
Associated Press writer Sadaqat Jan in Islamabad and Riaz Khan in Peshawar contributed to this report.
R.I.P. Islamabad 37.
Thirty-seven more souls gone to ALLAH - they will say.
+++
And now for page out of
the Book of the Bizarre...!
An odd mystery is definitely afoot over on the west coast of usually boring-as-blenders Canada...
A three-peded mystery too...
FEET have been washing up on the shores - and no one is coming forth with missing appendages crying "foul"...
Morbid comments follow the story...
As could be expected.
Another mysterious right foot floats ashore in Gulf Islands
Fri Feb 15, 11:44 AM
VANCOUVER (CBC) - For the third time in six months, a right foot wearing a sneaker has washed up on the shores of the Gulf Islands, in the Strait of Georgia.
The latest foot was found on the east side of Valdez Island, near Nanaimo.
Last August two other right feet, both male and both wearing size 12 sneakers, washed ashore on nearby Gabriola and Jedediah Islands.
Those cases are still under investigation, and so far no links between the three discoveries have been established, police said.
The latest appendage has been turned over to the B.C. Coroner's Service, and the RCMP is reviewing missing-persons files that could shed light on its discovery.
Two feet found in August
Police have yet to determine whether foul play had anything to do with the feet.
The discovery of the first two feet last summer prompted speculation that they might have belonged to men who died in a plane or boating accident.
The first was discovered Aug. 20 on Jedediah Island by a 12-year-old girl from Washington state, who found a black-and-white Adidas shoe with a sock and foot still inside.
The second was found six days later on Gabriola Island by a Vancouver couple who were hiking along the beach when they came upon a Reebok running shoe with human remains inside.
"We have been informed that it looks like both feet had separated from the body by natural decomposition, possibly while in the water,'' Cpl. Garry Cox of Oceanside RCMP on Vancouver Island said in August.
Cox said a cleanly cut foot would have been very suspicious, but natural decomposition suggests the victims might have drowned.
WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID ABOUT THIS NEWS STORY
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blacksheeep
OMG! Where were these at Christmas? They would've been perfect stocking stuffers!
POSTED BY: blacksheeep on SAT, FEB 16, 2008 09:55 PM -0500
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Last post should have said..cops CAN'T solve based on a single foot..or even three. That type of thing is tv drama only.
POSTED BY: SilenceisLoud on SAT, FEB 16, 2008 09:22 PM -0500
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vasilys maybe you watched too much Quincy when you were a kid. The cops can solve an entire mystery based on a washed up foot..or even 3. This is the real world. Fraser, it's not "weird" to find horse parts washed up. Where we live we find deer appendages, even heads. What happens is they go into the water..either by being chased or stranded by the tide. They drown. Things in the ocean chew on them and parts get washed up. 3 feet in a short time is odd but could also be coincidental.
POSTED BY: SilenceisLoud on SAT, FEB 16, 2008 09:18 PM -0500
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I'd say that something is definitely afoot there...
POSTED BY: gilltheloser on SAT, FEB 16, 2008 09:17 PM -0500
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So the RCMP think that 3 sneakered feet turning up is 'unusual'... similar to it snowing in November maybe? I'd call it extremely disturbing and a strong indication that people have been murdered in the area. Are we going to have another situation here where something dire gets discovered only by accident and too late, rather than as the result of speedy and serious police work? The RCMP's reaction to this situation is lapse in the extreme and is quite unbelievable imo
POSTED BY: vailsy on SAT, FEB 16, 2008 09:07 PM -0500
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My condolences to the three Left Feet...
Ok - that was "A page out of the Book of the Bizarre..." in the last "comment" there...
Onwards with real lugubrious / obituray-worthy news...
Police release suspects arrested in relation to the killing of 12-year-old girl
Fri Feb 15, 10:05 AM
By The Canadian Press
BRIDGEWATER, N.S. - Police in Bridgewater, N.S., have released two suspects brought in for questioning Thursday regarding the death of 12-year-old Karissa Boudreau.
Earlier, the RCMP confirmed the suspects were known to Boudreau, whose body was found in the woods outside the town last Saturday.
A third person - described as a person of interest - was questioned and released.
Police say the two suspects were released this morning around 10:30 a.m.
Investigators would not say whether the pair would be brought in for more questioning, but they confirmed they could not hold them in custody for more than 24 hours without filing charges.
Police have described Karissa's death as an "isolated case."
WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID ABOUT THIS NEWS STORY
No Photo Available.
guilty until proven innocent?? Kiwana I hope you aren't serious. Maybe you need to read John Grisham's latest book..a true story, and see what happens when people are guilty until proven innocent. I'm glad I don't live in your world.
POSTED BY: SilenceisLoud on SAT, FEB 16, 2008 09:48 PM -0500
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We need tougher laws to protect the children of our country- what is this non-sence- letting them go- they should be guilty until proven innocent!!! My deepest sympathy to the family.
POSTED BY: Kiwina on SAT, FEB 16, 2008 09:21 PM -0500
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R.I.P. KARISSA BOUDREAU
Your murderers will NOT escape DIVINE JUSTICE - and you know it well, where you are now...
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Typos galore - mea culpa...
Time pressing me...
"Obituary-worthy news" it is...
Suicide bomber kills 80 in Afghanistan
By ALLAUDDIN KHAN,
Associated Press Writer
1 minute ago
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - A suicide bombing at an outdoor dog fighting competition killed 80 people and wounded scores more Sunday, a governor said, in what appeared to be the deadliest terror attack in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.
Officials said the attack apparently targeted a prominent militia commander who had stood up against the Taliban. He died in the attack.
Several hundred people — including Afghan militia leaders — had gathered to watch the event on the western edge of the southern city of Kandahar. Witnesses reported gunfire from bodyguards after the blast; it was not immediately clear if the bullets killed anyone.
Kandahar Gov. Asadullah Khalid said 80 people died in the attack. Abdullah Fahim, a Health Ministry spokesman, said 70 were wounded.
Khalid blamed the bombing on the "enemy of Afghanistan" — an apparent reference to the Taliban. A Taliban spokesman said he didn't immediately know if the militants were responsible. The Taliban often claim responsibility immediately after major attacks against police and army forces — often naming the bombers — but shy away from claiming attacks with high civilian casualties.
Kandahar — the Taliban's former stronghold and Afghanistan's second largest city — is one of the country's largest opium poppy producing areas. The province has been the scene of fierce battles between NATO forces, primarily from Canada and the United States, and Taliban fighters over the last two years.
Dog fighting competitions are a popular form of entertainment around Afghanistan. The fights can attract hundreds of spectators who cram into a tight circle around the spectacle. The sport was banned during the Taliban rule.
The blast crumpled several Afghan police trucks and left bloodstains around the barren dirt field. Afghan soldiers donated blood at Kandahar's main hospital after the attack, said Dr. Durani, who goes by only one name.
"There are too many patients here," he said. "Some of them are in very serious condition."
Wali Karzai, brother of President Hamid Karzai and the president of Kandahar's provincial council, said the target of the attack was Abdul Hakim Jan, the leader of a local militia whom Karzai said was killed in the attack.
Jan was the provincial police chief in Kandahar in the early 1990s and was the only commander in the province to stand up against the Taliban during its rule, said Khalid Pashtun, a parliamentarian who represents Kandahar.
"Hakim Jan is one of the important, prominent jihadi commanders in Kandahar," Pashtun said. "There were so many people gathered and of course the Taliban and al-Qaida usually target this kind of important people."
Jan was most recently appointed the commander of an auxiliary police force — often shorthand for a local militia operating with government approval — to protect the Arghandab, a strategic area north of Kandahar. The area was overrun briefly by the Taliban late last year after the local leader, Mullah Naqibullah, died of heart attack.
A joint Afghan, NATO and U.S. force pushed the militants out of Arghandab. Shortly after, NATO's top commander in Afghanistan, U.S. Gen. Dan McNeill, visited Arghandab to reassure local leaders of the alliance's commitment to help President Hamid Karzai's government keep the area under their control.
Suicide attacks have been on the rise in Afghanistan, but rarely have they killed so many people. Militants carried out more than 140 suicide attacks in 2007, a record number.
Faizullah Qari Gar, a resident of Kandahar who was at the dog fight, said militant commanders' bodyguards opened fire on the crowd after the bombing.
"In my mind there were no Taliban to attack after the blast but the bodyguards were shooting anyway," he said.
The previous deadliest bomb attack came in November in the northern city of Baghlan, when a suicide bombing and subsequent gunfire from bodyguards killed about 70 people including six parliamentarians and 58 students and teachers. Investigators never determined how many of the deaths were caused by the blast and how many by the gunfire.
R.I.P. EIGHTY+...
Woman dies after fall from UN building
By JOHN HEILPRIN,
Associated Press Writer
UNITED NATIONS - A woman who worked for the United Nations died Sunday after falling from the 19th floor of the U.N.'s Secretariat Building, authorities said.
Police and U.N. security officers at the scene, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media, said the 45-year-old woman had jumped from a window after showing up to work early in the morning.
"A U.N. agency staff member died after falling from the 19th floor of the U.N. Secretariat Building," U.N. deputy spokeswoman Marie Okabe said. "At this time there is no suspicion of foul play."
Okabe said U.N. officials would not confirm her identity even after her next of kin were notified.
The official cause of death was to be determined by the medical examiner.
U.N. staff rushed to the scene and escorted investigators to the rear area of the building, where yellow tape was put up around the woman's body. Some U.N. staff were blocked from leaving the building just after the discovery.
In 1982, a 57-year-old senior U.N. official who had just resigned from the Office of Financial Services and was reported to have been upset about his failing health plunged to his death from the 18th floor of the Secretariat building.
R.I.P. U.N. WOMAN
May you find peace away from what tormented you...
There does seem to be a lot more going on at the U.N. than they let on...
+++
Rockets, mortars kill 4 in Baghdad
By JOHN AFFLECK,
Associated Press Writer
57 minutes ago
BAGHDAD - A string of mortar rounds and rockets slammed into several areas in Baghdad on Monday, including the U.S.-protected Green Zone and an airport housing complex, killing at least four people and wounding nearly 20, officials said.
Six mortar rounds struck a workers' housing complex near Baghdad's international airport, killing two people and wounding 10, a witness who lives at the compound said. The resident spoke on condition of anonymity because of security concerns.
An airport official confirmed the area was hit by a mortar attack but could not provide details about casualties.
The western Baghdad neighborhoods of Sadiyah and Amil, which is near the airport, also were hit by mortars or rockets, according to city police officials.
One police official said a total of four civilians were killed and 16 wounded in the violence in the capital. He could not provide a more specific breakdown.
Six to 13 rockets also struck the Green Zone on Monday afternoon, but no casualties were reported, according to an Interior Ministry official. All the officials declined to be identified because they weren't authorized to release the information.
U.S. Embassy and military officials did not immediately respond to a query about the reports.
The attacks underscored the fragility of recent security gains from U.S. and Iraqi operations.
Iraqi officials spent the weekend celebrating the successes of a crackdown that began on Feb. 14, 2007, and saw the eventual buildup of some 30,000 extra American troops. But the U.S. military has been more cautious, warning Shiite and Sunni extremists remain a serious threat.
U.S. troops on Monday captured a breakaway Shiite militia leader suspected of being a powerful criminal boss and providing Iranian weapons to fighters in western Baghdad, the military said.
The arrest occurred a day after a U.S. military spokesman said that, in the past week, Iraqi and U.S. forces had captured 212 weapons caches around the country, with growing evidence of an Iranian link.
"This is a significant capture of a top special groups leader," said Navy Capt. Vic Beck, a military spokesman. "Special groups" is a term the U.S. uses to describe Iranian-backed Shiite Muslim militias it says have broken with anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and refused to follow his cease-fire order.
The military said in a statement that intelligence reports led troops to the suspect, who was not identified, and he and another suspect were arrested without incident.
Back in Baghdad, the main suspect arrested was reportedly in charge of all Shiite militia fighters in the western half of the city. The area west of the Tigris River that divides the capital has been a Sunni stronghold but has seen an increased Shiite presence with sectarian cleansing that peaked after the Feb. 22, 2006, bombing of a Shiite mosque in Samarra.
The military said the suspect was responsible for providing weapons to militia members, including armor-piercing bombs known as explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, which U.S. officials say come from Iran. Tehran denies the allegations.
The man also allegedly selected fighters for paramilitary training and was an associate of other senior criminal leaders involved in attacks on U.S. and Iraqi security forces, the military said.
Al-Sadr pledged last year that his Mahdi Army last year would abide by a six-month cease-fire that has helped substantially decrease violence in Iraq, and that expires at the end of this month. But rogue groups have spun away from his organization and are receiving both Iranian training and weapons, including the EFPs, the U.S. says.
Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, a U.S. spokesman, said Sunday that the military has seen an increase in the use of weapons by Iranian-backed Shiite extremists. Many of the caches had been in Iraq for some time and Smith declined to link them to an increased flow of weapons into the country, but he said training and financing of the groups continues.
"In just the past week, Iraqi and coalition forces captured 212 weapons caches across Iraq, two of those coming from here inside Baghdad, with growing links to the Iranian-backed special groups," he said Sunday at a news conference.
"The Iranian-backed special groups in particular are volatile in the sense that they receive specific training inside of Iran," Smith added. "What we don't know precisely is whether or not there's any direction coming from Iran as to how they conduct their operations inside of Iraq. We do think that the training and financing of those activities remain in place."
In other violence Monday, a roadside bombing in the northwestern city of Mosul killed three civilians and wounded four others, police said. The city is what the U.S. describes as the last major urban stronghold of al-Qaida in Iraq.
The U.S. military also blamed al-Qaida in Iraq for a female suicide bombing on Sunday. The woman's explosives belt detonated after soldiers fired three bullets at her, the military said.
Casualty figures were disputed in Sunday's attack. Two doctors and a police officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to release the information, said four people were killed and 12 wounded. The U.S. military, however, said the only death in the explosion was the bomber, although two Iraqi army soldiers were wounded.
R.I.P. BAGHDAD QUATUOR
Indeed, as a commenter pointed out on another site of mine where an RSS feed of this is available, it wasn't like that just a short time ago in Baghdad... Or in Afghanistan... And elsewhere...
There weren't deaths every other day, be it four or forty a day, always in violent fashion.
Sure, there were other problems - but not daily death tolls.
It wasn't like this before U.S. intervention.
+++
Teen allegedly threatened by police
ORLANDO, Fla.,
Feb. 18 (UPI) --
A 17-year-old Deland, Fla., girl killed in a murder-suicide was allegedly told by police to stop calling for help or she'd be arrested.
Police said Clay Coffner shot his estranged girlfriend in the head Friday before turning the gun on himself, Orlando's WKMG-TV reported.
Sherry Hall, the girl's mother, said Monday that her daughter had been concerned about Coffner and informed police.
But, Hall said her daughter called police so much that on Jan. 15 they threatened her.
"The police officer said if you call us one more time on him, I'm going to arrest you both," Sherry Hall said. "So, the day she died, she knew she couldn't talk to police. So, she handled it herself."
DeLand police officials have not responded to the allegations.
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Where are you going to turn to, when the only *official* source of help out there THREATENS you?
She "handled it herself" alright - she died.
R.I.P. Miss Hall
My condolences to the mother, Sherry Hall, and all those who knew and cared for her daughter - those who cared truly for her, unlike either her alleged boyfriend...
or the cops.
+++
A flurry of demises have hit various parts of the world. What they all have in common is this: they were all too young to die.
Windsor Spitfires captain Mickey Renaud dies suddenly after collapsing
By The Canadian Press
WINDSOR, Ont. - Mickey Renaud was making all the improvements necessary to become an NHL player.
As captain of the Ontario Hockey League's Windsor Spitfires, his leadership qualities were evident. He had the size, too, to make an impact at the highest level of the sport he loved to play.
On Monday, at age 19, Renaud collapsed at his home in nearby Tecumseh and was transported to Windsor Regional Hospital with no vital signs. Resuscitation attempts failed and he was pronounced dead around noon.
"This is the biggest tragedy in Spitfire history," said team vice-president and general manager Warren Rychel. "Words alone cannot describe our pain at this time."
Renaud was to have participated in the team's Family Day skate at Windsor Arena beginning at noon Monday. His teammates were called off the ice.
Tecumseh OPP are investigating the death. An autopsy is scheduled for Tuesday morning.
The six-foot-three, 220-pound centre was the fourth pick, 143rd overall, by the Calgary Flames in the 2007 NHL entry draft. He showed solid development last season, when he scored 22 goals and amassed 54 points in 68 OHL games.
"It's just so sad when you see something like this happen," Flames pro scout Tom Webster, a former Spitfires coach who was close with Renaud, told The Canadian Press. "You feel so bad for his family and of course for his teammates. ...
"I've got so many mixed emotions, it's hard for everybody. For myself, it's almost like I end up losing a son. That's how close we were."
Webster praised Renaud's leadership, two-way play and tenacity, comparing him to Adam Graves. The NHL team believed Renaud had the skill to reach hockey's highest level.
"He was a guy that had a goal in mind and knew that a big part of it was his commitment to fitness," said Webster. "(He had) the willingness to put the time in regardless of a lot of distractions that may have come his way. ...
"He was going to give himself every chance possible to play (in the NHL)."
Mark Renaud, his father, played 142 NHL games with the Hartford Whalers and Buffalo Sabres from 1979-1984. His uncle, Chris Renaud, spent time in the New York Rangers organization while Webster coached there.
"When I see the character of this young man, you know (the apple) doesn't fall too far from the tree," said Webster.
Renaud, who wore No. 18, was in his third season with the Spitfires and had 21 goals and 41 points in 56 games this year. He was in the lineup when Windsor won 4-1 in Owen Sound on Sunday.
"He's our leader, he's our biggest healthiest kid. For something like this to suddenly happen, it's truly a tragedy. Our thoughts and prayers are with Mickey's family right now," Rychel told CKLW. "He's with his family having breakfast and something suddenly happens, it's shocking.
"It's tough right now, we have a lot of work to do to calm the storm here."
Jordan Nolan, the 18-year-old son of New York Islanders coach Ted Nolan, was one of several Windsor players who was shaken up. Ted Nolan skipped the first period of his team's 3-2 win over the San Jose Sharks to comfort his son.
"He was my son's teammate and good friend," said Nolan. "It was tragic."
Renaud's death evoked memories of former Oshawa Generals player Bruce Melanson, who collapsed during a team practice and died from a rare heart condition in 1985 at age 18.
"The entire Ontario Hockey League family is mourning this tragic news," said OHL commissioner David Branch. "We extend our deepest condolences to Mickey's family, friends and teammates during this very difficult time."
Renaud excelled at penalty killing, finishing third in the league last season with six short-handed goals.
He attended camp with the Flames last year and was assigned back to the OHL club. He had progressed steadily after scoring only eight goals in his rookie season in the OHL. Renaud was Windsor's seventh pick, 127th overall, in the 2004 OHL draft.
"We thought eventually he could come up and play (in the NHL) for us because of the character he had," said Webster. "He played with so much enthusiasm and could do a lot of things well. ...
"That's the thing I really loved about him. He was durable, he played through some tough times, yet he played every game."
Windsor's next scheduled game is at home Thursday against the Plymouth Whalers. There was no immediate word on whether it will be postponed.
Renaud's play has been key for the Spitfires, who are 33-15-6-4 this season after going a dismal 18-43-2-5 year in 2006-07. The team boasts a handful of high-scoring stars but Renaud was unquestionably the team leader.
Webster closely monitored the team's home games and Renaud was widely expected to sign with Calgary and play for their American Hockey League team next season.
"They did everything they could to revive him," Rychel told CKLW. "I've never had anything like this happen to me, the kids are in shock right now, it's a mess here in the Spitfire family. We're just going to do the best we can."
Renaud is survived by parents Mark and Jane and siblings Remy and Penny. Funeral arrangements were pending.
WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID ABOUT THIS NEWS STORY
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A young girl at my old highschool died while doing Ontario's fitness test. It's a shame when someone dies without reason so young, but we should give reason to his death by promoting routine check-ups and heart examinations in our young people so tragedies like this don't have to repeat themselves.
POSTED BY: blairs_smirk... on TUE, FEB 19, 2008 12:33 AM -0500
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such a sad day for hockey.. our sorrow here in calgary goes out to his family and friends...
POSTED BY: Kevin H on TUE, FEB 19, 2008 12:24 AM -0500
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Yeah this is terrible.
POSTED BY: alexp on MON, FEB 18, 2008 11:49 PM -0500
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Honeykissed25
A healthy fit boy dying so suddenly for no reason is so very sad. My heart goes out to the family and teammates. God give them strength.
POSTED BY: Honeykissed25 on MON, FEB 18, 2008 11:33 PM -0500
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Owner of fire-bombed Vancouver restaurant dies in suspected suicide
2 hours, 57 minutes ago
By Terri Theodore ,
The Canadian Press
VANCOUVER - There is a strange and tragic twist in the investigation of the arson attack and explosion that destroyed two businesses in downtown Vancouver last week.
Manjeet Nanda, co-owner of the Taco Del Mar restaurant targeted by the arson, has been found dead near Squamish, B.C. RCMP confirm a note was found and her family was advised.
"It's difficult to confirm it was a suicide until we get the autopsy results," said Cpl. Dave Ritchie of the Squamish police detachment.
Nanda was reported as a missing person last week shortly after she told the media she didn't know why someone would target her restaurant for arson.
Vancouver police Const. Tim Fanning said it's a tragic scenario.
"This family has lost their business, and now a loss of life - a mother of three. It's extremely tragic."
The 42-year-old woman's body was found Friday, floating in the waters of Howe Sound. It wasn't far from where her vehicle was parked on the side of the Sea to Sky Highway.
The blast and fire early Wednesday morning shook people awake as far as two kilometres away.
The explosion destroyed the restaurant along with the Starbucks next door and blew out several windows in nearby businesses.
The damage is estimated at about $2 million.
Fanning said Nanda was questioned by investigators last week.
"It's a very big investigation," he said. "There's a lot of evidence to go through, both with video tapes, witnesses. There's a lot of science behind this."
Police still haven't questioned the suspect believed to have set off the blast and fire.
He remains in hospital with burns to 40 per cent of his body.
Fanning said the man is expected to remain in hospital between one and two months.
"When we're actually able to speak to him and find out his side of the story could be some time."
Normally police don't report suspected suicides, but Ritchie said police made a statement because of the extended investigation.
Ritchie repeated that a suicide hasn't been confirmed.
"There's always that off chance that something was well planned and well manipulated. But generally we will find evidence in an autopsy."
WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID ABOUT THIS NEWS STORY
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This story is getting more and more bizarre every day...apparently the husband is missing...maybe it wasn't a suicide. Maybe he murdered her for life insurance money? Ther is more to the story...will be interesting to see how it plays out in the end.
POSTED BY: Angela on MON, FEB 18, 2008 11:53 PM -0500
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Paul
I believe life insurance doesn't hand out money in cases of suicide.
POSTED BY: Paul on MON, FEB 18, 2008 11:51 PM -0500
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Mr.Angry
I hate to cast suspicion and I don't know the woman, the burn victim in the hospital, nor any details outside of this article so keep all of that in mind, but one possible explanation is: she hired an arsonist to burn down her business to collect the insurance, the guy lying in hospital is (as the police suspect) the aronist, and she figured once he woke up she'd go to jail and her family would be on the hook for their debts. Killing herself at least left her family with life insurance money.
POSTED BY: Mr.Angry on MON, FEB 18, 2008 11:23 PM -0500
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No Photo Available.
Really glad to hear with the explosion that no-one sustained any injuries, that is a miracle in itself! It is tragic that the female owner has died, very sad. It must be all connected somehow. Hopefully the investigators will be able to put all the pieces of the puzzle together soon. I feel for the family of this woman.
POSTED BY: ronanshavauna on MON, FEB 18, 2008 11:06 PM -0500
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No Photo Available.
Lynn, friends call you milkwoman . Why? are u a cow
POSTED BY: avis on MON, FEB 18, 2008 10:50 PM -0500
1 - 5 of 59 | More... (hopefully not more inane "comments" like "avis" made there... His "avis" is not "nécessaire"...)
Welsh town hit by two more deaths as suicide fears linger
Sat Feb 16, 7:18 AM
LONDON (AFP) - Police were investigating Saturday the deaths of two more young people from a county in Wales hit by a wave of recent suicides.
The death of the pair, reported by British media to be cousins aged 20 and 15, comes after 14 others aged under 27 are thought to have killed themselves in Bridgend County in south Wales in just over a year.
Officials have tried to play down any suggestion that the deaths may be linked to an Internet death cult, with the local Welsh Assembly lawmaker describing such suggestions as "absolute nonsense".
The 15-year-old boy died in hospital Friday after police were called to his home in the town of Bridgend Thursday, where he had harmed himself.
The 20-year-old woman reported by British media to be his cousin was found dead Friday at a house in Folkestone, Kent, 250 miles (400 kilometres) away from Bridgend. She lived in Bridgend but had been visiting Folkestone.
Neither has been formally identified by police and officers have not said how they died, although media reports said they had hanged themselves.
The first in the recent wave of suicides came last January, when Dale Crole, 18, was found dead in a disused building.
The deaths have sparked fevered debate in the media about whether they are linked and connected to Internet social networking sites such as Bebo.
The local coroner Philip Walters, who is charged with establishing the cause of all violent, unnatural or sudden deaths, has said he is concerned but sees no connection between them.
Police have also played down any connection, while Madeleine Moon, the lawmaker who represents the area in the House of Commons, has criticised the media's coverage of the story, which she said could lead to copycat incidents.
Speaking after the latest deaths, Carwyn Jones, Bridgend's lawmaker in the Welsh Assembly in Cardiff, said: "The idea that there's a link here, or an Internet cult, is absolute nonsense...
"Every single case is now being reported to the nth degree, which makes it appear worse than it is."
He added that the county typically has around 20 suicides per year.
"I've been stunned by what I've seen in some of the newspapers -- saying it's a highly depressed seaside mining town is just completely mad," he added.
"People are extremely angry about the way the town has been portrayed."
WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID ABOUT THIS NEWS STORY
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No Photo Available.
Concerned citizen. I cannot believe that you would even suggest that anyone no matter what they do should go hang themselves. What if she read what you wrote and went and did kill herself ? What if she left kids behind? Who are you to judge? Yeah, I hate the advertisements too but please don't say stuff like that because you never know who is reading it. Yahoo will figure out a way to filter it but until then, ignore them, I do
POSTED BY: Dea G on TUE, FEB 19, 2008 01:02 AM -0500
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No Photo Available.
once again we learn the intense impact the media can have on personal and public opinion - copy cat killings - moneky see monkey do - and other silly cliches - the fact of the matter is that people are influenced by the media and for some reason the media sees freedom of the press means no responsibility for results of their hammering us with a constant barrage of gruesomeness !!
POSTED BY: peter.chuck on MON, FEB 18, 2008 02:17 AM -0500
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concernedcit...
so sad, and senseless. hopefully they find the cause of this. I feel sorry for the families of these young people. may the get through this. as for meangirl, and all these women and advertisers trying to lure us into their sick little world: you should do the world a favour and hang yourselves. you are nothing but trash and the world does not need crap like you living amongst people that love life and all the good it has to offer. do us a favour and seek help or off yourself please!
POSTED BY: concernedcit... on SUN, FEB 17, 2008 03:04 PM -0500
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RuralKipper
To the preachers of rhetoric, the women advertising themselves, the bigots, etc., this is not the thread for this. Anytime the world loses somebody, particular a group of young people, we should respect the sorrow of the surviving families & friends, not denigrate them
POSTED BY: RuralKipper on SUN, FEB 17, 2008 06:05 AM -0500
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wilde_hunnyb123
Not all suicide is a result of mental illness. Sometimes the problems are exogenous and we must look to the failings of society to resolve this issue as much as there must be a greater emphasis on mental health care. I am also disgusted with these hijackers on yahoo whoring themselves out and recommend that anybody else annoyed with this behavior file a formal complaint as well as report abuse.
POSTED BY: wilde_hunnyb123 on SUN, FEB 17, 2008 06:01 AM -0500
1 - 5 of 60 | More...
And here is the bit "more" that I added myself...
There are different ways to be concerned, clearly... About the topic at hand though, I cannot fathom anyone living seaside to be so depressed. The grass is always greener, yes, but these people should know their luck instinctively! No, there is something else there; and wouldn't it be so very ironic that this bit of old country was indeed being pervaded and ruined by the modern gizmos, such as the net...? Nothing nonsensical about it, my dear Welsh Assembly lawmaker...
R.I.P. Captain Renaud
R.I.P. Manjeet Nanda
R.I.P. Welsh Youths
+++
Hezbollah's most wanted commander killed in Syria bomb
Wed Feb 13, 3:20 PM
By Tom Perry and Laila Bassam
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Senior Hezbollah commander Imad Moughniyah, on the United States' most wanted list for attacks on Israeli and Western targets, has been killed by a bomb attack in Damascus, the Lebanese group said on Wednesday.
Hezbollah, which is backed by Syria and Iran, accused Israel of assassinating Moughniyah by planting a bomb in his car. Tehran blamed Israel and condemned the attack as an act of "state terrorism." Washington welcomed his death.
Israel denied any involvement in the killing, seen as a major blow to a group whose last confrontation with the Jewish state was the 34-day war of 2006.
Moughniyah, 45, was killed late on Tuesday. He had long been on a list of foreigners Israel wanted to kill or capture and had been top of Washington's wanted list before al Qaeda's Osama bin Laden emerged as an enemy of the United States.
"His killing is a huge blow to Hezbollah," Magnus Ranstorp, terrorism expert at the Swedish National Defence College, said.
In his first official reaction to Tuesday's killing, Syrian Interior Minister Bassam Abdel Majeed condemned the attack as a "terrorist act" and said that an investigation was under way.
"Syria condemns this cowardly terrorist act and presents its condolences to the Lebanese people and to the family of the martyr," the official SANA news agency quoted Abdel Majeed as saying.
Moughniyah was implicated in the 1983 bombings of the U.S. embassy and U.S. Marine and French peacekeeping barracks in Beirut, which killed over 350 people, as well as the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and the kidnapping of Westerners in Lebanon in the 1980s.
The United States indicted him for his role in planning and participating in the June 14, 1985, hijacking of a U.S. TWA airliner and the killing of an American passenger.
"The world is a better place without this man in it. He was a cold-blooded killer, a mass-murderer and a terrorist responsible for countless innocent lives lost," State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack said.
"One way or another he was brought to justice," he said.
Hezbollah, a strong political and military force in Lebanon, called followers to his funeral on Thursday.
"After a life full of jihad, sacrifices and accomplishments ... Haj Imad Moughniyah ... died a martyr at the hands of the Israeli Zionists," Hezbollah said.
Moughniyah's coffin, draped in a Hezbollah flag and flanked by four men in military uniform, was laid in a hall where his family and leaders of the Shi'ite group received condolences.
The 2006 war with Israel was triggered by a Hezbollah cross-border raid in which two Israeli soldiers were captured.
According to Israeli intelligence assessments, Moughniyah was involved in planning the operation. He had also once been head of the security network of Hezbollah, a group which emerged in the early 1980s during Lebanon's civil war.
TOUGH TARGET
Israel accuses Moughniyah of planning the 1994 bombing of a Jewish centre in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people and of involvement in a 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in the Argentine capital that killed 28.
"He was not only being targeted by Israel, but also by the Americans and many other parties," said former Mossad head Danny Yatom on Israel Radio. "He was one of the terrorists with the most amount of intelligence agencies and states chasing him."
Moughniyah had been a very tough target to track, he said. "He behaved with extreme caution for many years. It was impossible even to obtain his picture. He never appeared or spoke before the media.
"His identity was hidden. His steps were hidden. He behaved with extreme caution, and that was the reason it was difficult to get to him for so many years."
The United States tried to detain Moughniyah several times,
including a 1995 attempt to arrest him when the plane he was traveling was due to stop in Saudi Arabia. Saudi officials refused to allow the plane to land, diplomats say.
The attack occurred at an upmarket district housing an Iranian school, a police station and a Syrian intelligence office. Witnesses said that scores of police and intelligence officers rushed to the site. A police truck towed away the destroyed car, a new model Mitsubishi Pajero.
Senior Hamas officials, including leader Khaled Meshaal, live in exile in Damascus.
"Israel rejects the attempts of terror elements to attribute to Israel any involvement in this incident," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office said in a statement.
Moughniyah is thought to have been commander of Islamic Jihad, a shadowy pro-Iranian group which emerged in Lebanon in the early 1980s and was believed linked to Hezbollah.
Islamic Jihad kidnapped several Western hostages, including Americans, in Beirut in the mid 1980s. The group killed some of its captives and exchanged others for U.S. weapons to Iran in what was later known as the Iran-Contra scandal. Among those killed was the CIA's station chief.
Moughniyah's brother was killed in a car bomb in Beirut in 1994. Reports at the time suggested Imad had been the target. Moughniyah had spent much of the 1990s in Iran.
For a FACTBOX on Moughniyah click on
(Additional reporting by Nadim Ladki in Beirut, Adam Entous and Ari Rabinovitch in Jerusalem, Sue Pleming in Washington and Khaled Yacoub Oweis in Damascus; Editing by Samia Nakhoul)
WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID ABOUT THIS NEWS STORY
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No Photo Available.
Shoulda bombed the funeral too!
POSTED BY: It's me ... on MON, FEB 18, 2008 02:38 PM -0500
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Templarknight
when you see ali @ itrav,here ask these questions and try and get a good reply, what do the women bombers get for being a martyr and what do the children martyrs get as their muslim men get those 72 vestal 6 year olds in death, then again if the islam faith is one of passion, love and peace, understanding and it is law not to kill fellow muslims, why then do they cut off heads and blow each other up so fast each day? good questions but watch them squirm, knowing allah @ moohamad were pedophiles
POSTED BY: Templarknight on FRI, FEB 15, 2008 08:52 PM -0500
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Templarknight
scalpcutter itravelor and ali rogers are simple muslims trying their best to evade questions that even their allah cant answer, all they have in that religion is hate cause when the real questions come forth what else are they expected to do? one cant get a straight answer from them on anything, asking these guys questions embarrasses them more as they too know their allah is a pedophile, and moohammad a mass murderer of muslims, all they have is hateful fear and they hide under sheets in fear
POSTED BY: Templarknight on FRI, FEB 15, 2008 08:47 PM -0500
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Just so you know..the hisballsa got shot off was founded years ago when all the arab terrorists were being snuffed out by the jews. itraveller and ali-g ..a couple of gutless liars, with no stones and can't come out of the closet.
POSTED BY: scalpcutter on FRI, FEB 15, 2008 02:58 AM -0500
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No Photo Available.
itraveller is a ball-less molester. He lives with his mommy. He does not have the stones to come to ottawa so he lets on he is a world traveller living in russian and visting 35 countries...lol. This guy has zero credibility and can't back up any of his claims. Everyone and I mean everyone sees right thru the little weakling. Emotional, physical and mental toughness..itraveller has none of it. If he were a man he'd come to ottawa and come straight with what he/it is?
POSTED BY: scalpcutter on FRI, FEB 15, 2008 02:52 AM -0500
1 - 5 of 154 | More... or here!
You can probaly find more joyously lugubrious comments like the ones above on the above linked URL...
As for me...
No comment!
US Humane Society to honor boy who died saving pets
Fri Feb 15, 9:27 AM ET
NEW YORK (AFP) - The Humane Society of the United States, the leading US animal welfare organization, is to honor a New York boy who died last year after going back into his blazing home to rescue his pets.
The organization was to present the Circle of Compassion award on Saturday to Thomas and Maria Monahan, whose nine-year-old son Tommy was overcome by smoke last December after trying to save his pet dog, lizard and fish.
The award recognizes and honors individuals who have performed an act of significant courage or compassion to assist an animal in need.
Tommy and his family initially escaped from the fire in their New York home. "But when Tommy realized that his beloved pets were still inside, he broke away from his mother and ran back into the flames," the society said.
"An avid lover of animals and nature, he did what was in his heart and tried to rescue the animals who were so dear to him," it added.
The organization did not say whether any of the animals survived the blaze.
Making a Home for Charlie, Away From Baghdad's Slums
An Iraqi Dog Has His Day
SPCA International Baghdad Pups program transports a dog named Charlie, of Charlie Company, for a soldier in Iraq who befriended the 9-month-old Border Collie mix.
By Karin Brulliard
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 15, 2008;
Page B01
He hesitated just a bit as he rounded a corner inside Dulles International Airport yesterday and spotted the flock of television cameras and cooing journalists awaiting him. Then, with posture erect like a soldier's, he trotted straight toward the action -- he was used to bomb blasts and gunfire, after all, so this was nothing.
Post-escape from Baghdad and fresh off a 13-hour flight from Kuwait, Charlie the border collie mix actually seemed to be smiling for the crowd.
Five months after the SPCA International received a plea from American soldiers hoping to transfer their beloved Iraqi stray to U.S. terrain, the 9-month-old mutt became the first beneficiary of the animal advocacy organization's effort to rescue pets from the war zones where they provide solace to service members. Charlie eventually will live in Phoenix with one of his caretaker soldiers.
It being Valentine's Day, the SPCA dished out the emotional hyperbole. Charlie's bond with his caretakers, the organization said, "is the ultimate love story between a man and his dog." The soldiers, too, were effusive.
"We can't wait for him to get his first taste of the good old USA," one wrote in an e-mail to the SPCA. "We especially can't wait until we can see him again."
(...)
Both touching, heartwarming stories - the likes of which we should have more of, here, on the Lugubrious Blog and in the news in general too.
+++
10 dead, 9 missing in Brazil shipwreck
Thu Feb 21, 3:07 PM ET
SAO PAULO, Brazil - A ferryboat carrying more than 100 passengers collided with a barge loaded with fuel tanks and sank to the bottom of the Amazon River on Thursday, officials said. At least 10 people died, and another nine were missing and feared dead.
The Almirante Monteiro capsized at dawn near the isolated Brazilian town of Itacoatiara in the jungle state of Amazonas, state fire spokesman Lt. Clovis Araujo said.
He said 92 people were rescued by several small boats and the state's floating police station, a 32-foot vessel that travels up and down the river and was in the area at the time of the shipwreck.
Rescue teams recovered the bodies of four children, five women and one man, Araujo said, and a check of the boat's passenger manifest indicated nine people were still missing.
"The chances of finding them alive are remote," he said. "We will keep searching until the last body is found.
He said he did not know how many people were on the barge, but "no one was hurt and the barge was not damaged."
Many of the missing were likely passengers who were asleep in cabins inside the two-story wooden vessel and were unable to get out before the boat sank, state public safety department spokesman Aguinaldo Rodrigues said.
"As far as we can tell, just about all the survivors were passengers sleeping in hammocks on the deck," Rodrigues said.
Rodrigues said it was too early to determine the causes of the accident, but "visibility was very poor" at the time of the collision during the lunar eclipse that began Wednesday night.
The survivors were taken to the small town of Novo Remanso and sheltered in the local church. They were to be taken by helicopter to the state capital of Manaus.
On my mother's side of the family, all but ONE of the men from an entire generation (that of my great-grandmother) perished during a freak boating accident, when a calm sea suddenly went crazy, capsizing their boat...
Such tragedies, that can decimate entire clans, are always beyond description in regard to the sheer despair they inflict upon the survivors...
My sincerest condolences to the families affected here.
R.I.P. Brazilian Ferryboat Travelers
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'No survivors' in Venezuelan plane crash: officials
2 hours, 11 minutes ago
CARACAS (AFP) - A twin-prop passenger plane slammed into a mountain face shortly after taking off from a popular tourist spot in Venezuela's rugged Andes region overnight, killing all 46 people on board, officials said Friday.
The ATR-42 aircraft, owned Santa Barabara Airlines, a Venezuelan company, was "practically pulverized" on impact, a rescue worker who flew over the crash site, fire services sergeant Jodi Paz, told Globovision television.
"It crashed at an altitude [of]12,000 feet against a wall of rock," he said, adding: "There are no survivors."
The plane went down 11 kilometers northeast of the airport in Merida, the main town in the Venezuelan Andes that each year attracts thousands of tourists from around the world.
It had been flying to the capital Caracas, 500 kilometers distant.
An official at the national civil aeronautical institute, General Ramon Vina, confirmed that, "by the type of impact, we presume that there are no survivors."
He said the rough terrain meant search and recovery teams had to be flown in by helicopter. But access to the crash site was only by foot, he added.
The civil protection director for Merida, Noel Marquez, told AFP by telephone that the plane went down near El Paramo, in the El Campanario region of the Andes.
Santa Barbara Airlines said the plane, of French-Italian construction, dated from the late 1980s.
It was carrying three crew members and 43 passengers at the time of the accident, according to the Aviation Safety Network, an online service that tracks plane accidents worldwide.
The airline, founded in the Venezuelan city of Maraciabo in 1995, had no record of accidents prior to the crash.
It serves both domestic and international routes, flying to Madrid, Miami, Aruba and Tenerife.
R.I.P. 43 PASSENGERS
R.I.P. ATR-42's pilot, co-pilot and flight attendant
My condolences to all the bereaved in this latest tragedy in the air...
+++
More deaths in the air -
though not at all in crashes...
Woman refused help by attendant dies on U.S. commercial flight to New York
Sun Feb 24, 9:06 PM
By The Associated Press
NEW YORK - An American Airlines passenger returning home from Haiti collapsed and died after a flight attendant told her he couldn't give her any oxygen and then tried to help her with an empty oxygen tank, a relative said.
American Airlines confirmed the flight death and said medical professionals tried to save the passenger, Carine Desir.
Desir had complained of not feeling well and being very thirsty on the Friday flight from Port-au-Prince after she ate a meal, said Antonio Oliver, a cousin who was travelling with her and her brother Joel Desir. A flight attendant gave her water, he said.
A few minutes later, Desir said she was having "trouble breathing" and asked for oxygen but a flight attendant twice refused her request, Oliver said Sunday in a telephone interview.
After the flight attendant refused to administer oxygen to Desir, she became extremely distressed, pleading: "Don't let me die," Oliver recalled.
He said other passengers aboard Flight 896 became agitated over the situation and the flight attendant, apparently after phone consultation with the cockpit, tried to administer oxygen from a portable tank and mask but the tank was empty.
Oliver said two doctors and two nurses were aboard and tried to administer oxygen from a second tank, which also was empty.
Desir, who lived in New York, was placed on the floor and a nurse tried CPR but to no avail, Oliver said. A "box," possibly a defibrillator, also was applied but didn't function effectively, he said.
"I cannot believe what is happening on the plane," he said, sobbing.
"She cannot get up, and nothing on the plane works."
Oliver said he then asked for the plane to "land right away so I can get her to a hospital" and the pilot agreed to divert to Miami, 45 minutes away.
But during that time Desir collapsed and died, Oliver said.
"Her last words were: 'I cannot breathe,"' he said.
Desir, 44, was pronounced dead by one of the doctors, Joel Shulkin, and the flight continued to John F. Kennedy International Airport, without stopping in Miami, with the woman's body moved to the floor of the first-class section and covered with a blanket, Oliver said.
American Airlines spokeswoman Sonja Whitemon wouldn't comment Sunday on Oliver's claims of faulty medical equipment.
Shulkin, through his lawyer, Justin Nadeau, declined comment on the incident out of respect for Desir's family.
American Airlines, a unit of AMR Corp. based in Fort Worth, Texas, is the largest U.S. domestic airline.
WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID ABOUT THIS NEWS STORY
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Jim-Calgary
It's pathetic in this day and age this can happen. We go to the moon, shoot down satellites - but we can't fill Oxygen tanks? SHAME on AA - I will never fly with them - no matter what the "autopsy says" (what a cop-out excuse: regardless, they shouldn't be empty).
POSTED BY: Jim-Calgary on TUE, FEB 26, 2008 12:35 AM -0500
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mickey
Everyone had to take their shoes off before getting on the plane and were xeroxed to the nines but American can take off with no safety equipement what a terrible thing to happen my bet is American will soon learn their lesson in a court of law, the lawsuit will be more than American airlines is worth anyone that was near that women will be able to take them to court and skin theso and so's until they learn that passengers who are not only people but require help from time to time.
POSTED BY: mickey on TUE, FEB 26, 2008 12:33 AM -0500
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Don't worry everyone, that's an open and shut lawsuit...at least in the States. The family will have their pain eased with boatloads of cash, and those stupid executives that get million dollar bonuses to come up with policies that screw people over will miss their bonuses this year!
POSTED BY: juder111 on TUE, FEB 26, 2008 12:29 AM -0500
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Clearly the spokeswoman for american airlines is as about as usefull as their oxygen tanks. How in the 21st century can something like this be overlooked. It's their jobs to refuel, clean the toilets, provide basic food/water and take care of their passengers. End of Story. They can never pay enough for this kind of mistake. They should pay the family, the town and any other charity as pure punishment. Greedy Corporate idiots...who cares about airmiles.
POSTED BY: Pandamonia m... on TUE, FEB 26, 2008 12:23 AM -0500
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No Photo Available.
Airline travel used to be a pleasant way of getting somewhere. Now the passenger is treated as a necessary annoyance. Getting a root canal almost seems like a pleasant alternative. How sad.
POSTED BY: da philster on TUE, FEB 26, 2008 12:23 AM -0500
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British plane diverted to Turkey after co-pilot dies mid-flight
Mon Feb 25, 11:07 AM
By The Associated Press
LONDON - A British airline says one of its flights was forced to divert to Turkey on Sunday after the co-pilot died in mid-flight of natural causes.
GB Airways said the Airbus A320, carrying 156 passengers from Manchester to Paphos, Cyprus, landed in Istanbul after what was termed a medical emergency on the flight deck.
The co-pilot, 43-year-old Michael Warren, was a former Royal Air Force pilot. He was married and had two children.
Cause of death were not released.
The airline says passengers, who were never in danger, will be flown on to Cyprus today.
WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID ABOUT THIS NEWS STORY
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Squidly Leu
George Kennedy even said don't eat the fish on "airplane"
POSTED BY: Squidly Leu on MON, FEB 25, 2008 11:20 PM -0500
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No Photo Available.
Actually, my Great-Great Grandfather was THAT "Man from Nantucket," so I know exactly what the Warren family is going through...
POSTED BY: samuel_salami on MON, FEB 25, 2008 10:51 PM -0500
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Mel
First of all, my condolences to the Warren family. Secondly, Those of you who are joking about the story really show the degradation of compassion in society today. A human being died... someone's son, father, husband, brother, etc. How would you feel if people made jokes about the death of YOUR loved one? Show some respect.
POSTED BY: Mel on MON, FEB 25, 2008 10:43 PM -0500
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No Photo Available.
Why are you guys attacking ol.gouch? Many modern heavy aircraft do have joysticks in lieu of old fashioned columns and yokes. He is correct, and actually many aircraft with "autoland" will take you smoothly to the tarmac, the human only needs to apply brakes and reversers and steer it to the gate. Yes, I am an AME and do KNOW this.
POSTED BY: The Loyalist on MON, FEB 25, 2008 09:19 PM -0500
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Squidly Leu
He ate the fish didn't he......never eat the fish!
POSTED BY: Squidly Leu on MON, FEB 25, 2008 09:17 PM -0500
1 - 5 of 31 | More comments once again... here
And in a totally different and unrelated demise story, one that still belongs to the "entirely avoidable death files"...
Man dies after cake-eating contest: officials
Mon Feb 25, 7:47 AM
LONDON (AFP) - A man has died after taking part in a competition to see how many cup cakes he could eat at once, officials said Monday.
Paramedics were called to revive Adam Deeley, 34, after receiving a call saying he was choking at a cafe in Swansea, south Wales, in the early hours of Friday but could not save him and he died in hospital.
He had reportedly been attending a party to raise funds for an exhibition by a local artist.
"Quite a spread had been laid on and when the party finished in the early hours, there was quite a lot left over," an unnamed witness told the Sun newspaper.
"Someone suggested seeing how quickly they could eat the mound of fairy cakes that were left. But suddenly, someone started choking."
The paper reported that five cakes got stuck in Deeley's throat, although police say they are still investigating the cause of the death.
Inspector Paul McCarthy said: "The issue concerning cakes is something we are looking at as a contributory factor in his passing."
In a statement, cafe owners Amanda Davey and Paul Dyke said: "It was a tragic accident and very sad and should serve as a cautionary tale."
The Welsh Ambulance Service said it attended "after receiving a report a man was choking". The local coroner will open an investigation into the death in the coming days.
WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID ABOUT THIS NEWS STORY
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No Photo Available.
why would you do this to yoursel[profane]???stoned, drunk,,,,,,,, maybe???
POSTED BY: noonans on MON, FEB 25, 2008 11:29 PM -0500
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RiverWolf
What a dumb thing to do! These eating contests are the silliest thing ever thought up. What a waste all around; it should be stopped. Died eating cake! Is that what they will put on his tombstone? Wouldn’t be what Marie Antoinette had in mind when she said “…let them eat cake”.
POSTED BY: RiverWolf on MON, FEB 25, 2008 11:27 PM -0500
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wow....what a way to go.....
POSTED BY: zzatomzz on MON, FEB 25, 2008 11:18 PM -0500
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No Photo Available.
I think what the story is saying is that this incident happened AFTER the charity was over, and was not part of it. However, people need to start using common sense to prevent these tragic deaths. God gave us a brain....USE IT. Just b/c there's food left over, doesn't mean someone should be foolish or waste it. These cupcakes could've been put to better use....like a shelter. It's a sad story.
POSTED BY: cookie on MON, FEB 25, 2008 11:16 PM -0500
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Fairy cakes? Wow.....who would have thunk it! LOL
POSTED BY: alpha_newcomb on MON, FEB 25, 2008 11:14 PM -0500
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R.I.P. Carine Desir
where you are now, heavenly attendants are a gazillion times better than A.A. flight attendants - and your flight will be that more pleasant too.
R.I.P. Michael Warren
the same goes for you - and this flight, this time around, won't put any pressure upon you to "perform" or anything else...
R.I.P. Adam Deeley
where you are headed, I am sure they will not accuse you of gluttony. Rather, you will laud your altruism.
My condolences to all the friends and relatives of the deceased who are bereaved now as a result of the three completely avoidable demises...
+++
When you can't even grieve without DYING YOURSELF - there's something seriously wrong there...
Bomb kills 35 at Pakistan funeral
By RIAZ KHAN,
Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 21 minutes ago
PESHAWAR, Pakistan - A suicide bomber attacked the funeral for a slain police officer in Pakistan's volatile Swat Valley, killing at least 35 people and wounding 62 others, police said.
The attack occurred at a government high school in Mingora town while funeral prayers were being held for Javed Iqbal, who was killed in a roadside bombing earlier in the day.
About 800 people were at the funeral, including civilians and police officials, said Shahbuddin, an assistant inspector of police who was at the funeral on security duty and who uses one name.
The explosion occurred just as the pallbearers lifted the coffin to carry it toward the grave, he told The Associated Press.
"As the coffin was lifted I moved toward the gate but suddenly a big explosion took place, which dashed me against the gate ... It was hell. Everybody was crying for help," said Shahbuddin, who was slightly injured in the attack.
Mingora, in Swat Valley in northwestern Pakistan, is 105 miles from Peshawar, a town at the border with Afghanistan.
President Pervez Musharraf sent thousands of troops to the scenic Swat Valley earlier this year to quell an uprising led by a pro-Taliban cleric. The army claims it has dispersed thousands of his militant followers, but attacks persist. Last week, a roadside bomb hit a wedding party, killing 12 people.
Iqbal, the deputy police chief of the Lakki Marwat district, and his driver were killed in a roadside bomb Friday morning. By the time his body was brought to his hometown of Mingora for the funeral, night had fallen.
"Because it was dark, the suicide bomber was able to mingle among the people easily," Shahbuddin said.
He said he later went to the hospital where the injured were taken.
"I have seen 35 dead and over 60 injured in the hospital and am now completing the paperwork," said Shahbuddin.
Dr. Fazal Wahab, who was treating the injured, said the hospital has been overwhelmed by the high casualties.
"We have treated a large number of injured, some in very critical condition," he told the AP.
Taliban militants have stepped up attacks and taken control of tracts of northwestern Pakistan bordering Afghanistan in the past several years. Before militants took root last summer, Swat attracted tourists because of its fine mountain scenery.
___
Associated Press Writer Zarar Khan in Islamabad contributed to this report.
Factory fire kills 15 in southern China
Wed Feb 27, 1:56 AM ET
BEIJING (Reuters) - A factory fire in southern China on Wednesday killed 15 people and severely injured three, state media said.
The fire broke out in the southern city of Shenzhen, bordering Hong Kong.
"Firemen rescued six from the building. Three were injured and are now receiving treatment in hospital," Xinhua news agency said.
The bottom floor of the building was used as a workshop for foam products, Xinhua said. It did not say how many people were working in the factory when the fire started.
Earlier this month, a hotel fire in eastern Zhejiang province killed 11 people.
(Reporting by Beijing newsroom; Editing by Nick Macfie)
Conservative author Buckley dies at 82
By HILLEL ITALIE,
AP National Writer
Wed Feb 27, 5:53 PM ET
NEW YORK - William F. Buckley Jr. died at work, in his study. The Cold War had ended long before. A Republican was in the White House. The word "liberal" had been shunned like an ill-mannered guest.
At the end of his 82 years, much of it spent stoking and riding a right-wing wave as an erudite commentator and conservative herald, all of Buckley's dreams seemingly had come true.
"He founded a magazine, wrote over 50 books, influenced the course of political history, had a son, had two grandchildren and sailed across the Atlantic Ocean three times," said his son, novelist Christopher Buckley. "He really didn't leave any stone unturned."
Buckley was found dead in his study Wednesday morning in Stamford, Conn. His son noted Buckley had died "with his boots on, after a lifetime of riding pretty tall in the saddle."
His assistant said Buckley was found by his cook. The cause of death was unknown, but he had been ill with emphysema, she said.
As an editor, columnist, novelist, debater and host of the TV talk show "Firing Line," Buckley worked at a daunting pace, taking as little as 20 minutes to write a column for his magazine, National Review.
Yet on the platform, he was all handsome, reptilian languor, flexing his imposing vocabulary ever so slowly, accenting each point with an arched brow or rolling tongue and savoring an opponent's discomfort with wide-eyed glee.
"There's no `weltschmerz,' or any sadness that permeates my vision," he told The Associated Press during a 2004 interview at his Park Avenue duplex. "There isn't anything I reasonably hoped for that wasn't achieved."
President Bush called Buckley a great political thinker, wit, author and leader. "He influenced a lot of people, including me," the president said. "He captured the imagination of a lot of people."
But Buckley was also willing to criticize his own and made no secret of his distaste for at least some of Bush's policies. In a 2006 interview with CBS, he called the Iraq war a failure.
"If you had a European prime minister who experienced what we've experienced, it would be expected that he would retire or resign," Buckley said at the time.
Luck was in the very bones of Buckley, blessed with a leading man's looks, an orator's voice, a satirist's wit and an Ivy League scholar's vocabulary. But before he emerged in the 1950s, few imagined conservatives would rise so high, or so enjoy the heights.
For at least a generation, conservatism had meant the pale austerity of Herbert Hoover, the grim isolationism of Sen. Robert Taft, the snarls and innuendoes of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Democrats were the party of big spenders and "Happy Days Are Here Again." Republicans settled for respectable cloth coats.
Unlike so many of his peers and predecessors on the right, Buckley wasn't a self-made man prescribing thrift, but a multimillionaire's son who enjoyed wine, sailing and banter and assumed his wishes would be granted. Even historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who labeled Buckley "the scourge of American liberalism," came to appreciate his "wit, his passion for the harpsichord, his human decency, even ... his compulsion to epater the liberals."
Buckley once teased Schlesinger after the historian praised the rise of computers for helping him work more quickly. "Suddenly I was face to face with the flip side of Paradise," Buckley wrote. "That means, doesn't it, that Professor Schlesinger will write more than he would do otherwise?"
Buckley founded the biweekly magazine National Review in 1955, declaring that he proposed to stand "athwart history, yelling `stop' at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who urge it."
Conservatives had been outsiders in both mind and spirit, marginalized by a generation of discredited stands — from opposing Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal to the isolationism that preceded the U.S. entry into World War II. Before Buckley, liberals so dominated intellectual thought that critic Lionel Trilling claimed there were "no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation."
"Bill could go to the campus with that arch manner of his. And he was exciting and young and conservative," conservative author and columnist George Will told the AP in 2004. "And all of a sudden, conservatism was sexy."
In the 1950s, "conservatism was barely a presence at all," Will said. "To the extent that it was a political presence, it was a blocking faction in Congress."
The National Review was initially behind history, opposing civil rights legislation and once declaring that "the white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail."
Buckley also had little use for the music of the counterculture, once calling the Beatles "so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of antimusic."
The magazine could do little to prevent Barry Goldwater's landslide defeat in 1964, but as conservatives gained influence, so did Buckley and his magazine. The long rise would peak in 1980, when Buckley's good friend Ronald Reagan was elected president.
"Ronnie valued Bill's counsel throughout his political life, and after Ronnie died, Bill and Pat were there for me in so many ways," Reagan's widow, Nancy Reagan, said Wednesday in a statement.
Buckley's wife, the former Patricia Alden Austin Taylor, died in 2007 at age 80. Christopher is their only child. Buckley is also survived by two brothers and three sisters.
Christopher Buckley remembers his father's one losing adventure, albeit one happily lost. William F. Buckley was the Conservative Party's candidate for mayor of New York in 1965, waging a campaign that was in part a lark — he proposed an elevated bikeway on Second Avenue — but that also reflected a deep distaste for the liberal Republicanism of Mayor John V. Lindsay.
"By this time I realized he wasn't just any other dad," Christopher Buckley told the AP. "I was 13 at the time, and there were mock debates in my fifth grade home room class. And there were people playing him, so that was kind of strange.
"And that's when you get the sense that your dad is not just Ozzie and your parents are not Ozzie and Harriet. But he was a great dad, and he was a great man, and that's not a bad epitaph."
Steelers’ former radio announcer Myron Cope dies at 79
By ALAN ROBINSON,
AP Sports Writer
Feb 27, 4:41 pm EST
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Pittsburgh Steelers fans wave terrible towels before Monday Night Football against the Baltimore Ravens in Pittsburgh, in this Oct. 31, 2005 file photo. Myron Cope, the screechy-voiced announcer whose colorful catch phrases and twirling Terrible Towel became symbols of the Pittsburgh Steelers during an unrivaled 35 seasons in the broadcast booth, died Wednesday Feb. 27, 2008 in Mount Lebanon, Pa.. He was 79.
PITTSBURGH (AP)—Myron Cope spoke in a language and with a voice never before heard in a broadcast booth, yet a loving Pittsburgh understood him perfectly during an unprecedented 35 years as a Steelers announcer.
The screechy-voiced Cope, a writer by trade and an announcer by accident whose colorful catch phrases and twirling Terrible Towel became nationally known symbols of the Steelers, died Wednesday at age 79.
Cope died at a nursing home in Mount Lebanon, a Pittsburgh suburb, Joe Gordon, a former Steelers executive and a longtime friend of Cope’s, said. Cope had been treated for respiratory problems and heart failure in recent months.
Cope’s tenure from 1970-2004 as the color analyst on the Steelers’ radio network is the longest in NFL history for a broadcaster with a single team and led to his induction into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2005.
“His memorable voice and unique broadcasting style became synonymous with Steelers football,” team president Art Rooney II said Wednesday. “They say imitation is the greatest form of flattery, and no Pittsburgh broadcaster was impersonated more than Myron.”
One of Pittsburgh’s most colorful and recognizable personalities, Cope was best known beyond the city’s three rivers for the yellow cloth twirled by fans as a good luck charm at Steelers games since the mid-1970s.
The Terrible Towel is arguably the best-known fan symbol of any major pro sports team, has raised millions of dollars for charity and is displayed at the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Upon Cope’s retirement in 2005, team chairman Dan Rooney said, “You were really part of it. You were part of the team. The Terrible Towel many times got us over the goal line.”
Even after retiring, Cope—a sports talk show host for 23 years—continued to appear in numerous radio, TV and print ads, emblematic of a local popularity that sometimes surpassed that of the stars he covered.
Team officials marveled how Cope received more attention than the players or coaches when the Steelers checked into hotels, accompanied by crowds of fans so large that security guards were needed in every city.
“It is a very sad day, but Myron lived every day to make people happy, to use his great sense of humor to dissect the various issues of the sporting world. … He’s a legend,” former Steelers Pro Bowl linebacker Andy Russell said.
Cope didn’t become a football announcer until age 40, spending the first half of his professional career as a sports writer. He was hired by the Steelers in 1970, several years after he began doing TV sports commentary on the whim of WTAE-TV program director Don Shafer, mostly to help increase attention and attendance as the Steelers moved into Three Rivers Stadium.
Coincidentally, a pair of rookies—Cope and a quarterback named Terry Bradshaw—made their Steelers debuts during the team’s first regular season game at Three Rivers on Sept. 20, 1970.
Neither Steelers owner Art Rooney nor Cope had any idea how much impact he would have on the franchise. Within two years of his hiring, Pittsburgh would begin a string of home sellouts that continues to this day, a stretch that includes five Super Bowl titles.
Cope became so popular that the Steelers didn’t try to replace his unique perspective and top-of-the-lungs vocal histrionics when he retired, instead downsizing from a three-man announcing team to a two-man booth.
====================
Pittsburgh Steelers football fans wave and show their "Terrible Towels" as they cheer in this file photo from a Pep Rally in Heinz Field, Jan. 27, 2006, in Pittsburgh.
====================
Myron Cope, the screechy-voiced announcer whose colorful catch phrases and twirling Terrible Towel became symbols of the Pittsburgh Steelers during an unrivaled 35 seasons in the broadcast booth, died Wednesday Feb. 27, 2008 in Mount Lebanon, Pa.. He was 79.
Just as Pirates fans once did with longtime broadcaster Bob Prince, Steelers fans began tuning in to hear what wacky stunt or colorful phrase Cope would come up with next. With a voice beyond imitation—a falsetto so shrill it could pierce even the din of a touchdown celebration—Cope was a man of many words, some not in any dictionary.
To Cope, an exceptional play rated a “Yoi!” A coach’s doublespeak was “garganzola.” The despised rival to the north was always the Cleve Brownies, never the Cleveland Browns.
Cope gave four-time Super Bowl champion coach Chuck Noll the only nickname that ever stuck, the Emperor Chaz. For years, Cope laughed off the downriver and often downtrodden Cincinnati Bengals as the Bungles, though never with a malice or nastiness that would create longstanding anger.
Among those longtime listeners was a Pittsburgh high school star turned NFL player turned Steelers coach—Bill Cowher.
“My dad would listen to his talk show and I would think, `Why would you listen to that?”’ Cowher said. “Then I found myself listening to that. I (did) my show with him, and he makes ME feel young.”
Cope, who was born Myron Kopelman, was preceded in death by his wife, Mildred, in 1994. He is survived by a daughter, Elizabeth, and a son, Daniel, who is autistic and lives at Allegheny Valley School, which received all rights to the Terrible Towel in 1996. Another daughter, Martha Ann, died shortly after birth.
Associated Press Writer Joe Mandak in Pittsburgh contributed to this report.
Woman, 92, dies in crash with police cruiser
Mon Feb 25, 7:41 PM
CALGARY (CBC) - A 92-year-old woman died after the car she was in collided with a marked Calgary police cruiser responding to an emergency call during the weekend.
Two marked units were on their way to a domestic call involving a weapon in the Haysboro area when they stopped at a red light at Macleod Trail and Heritage Drive S.W. on Sunday morning.
The police vehicles both activated their emergency lights and sirens and entered the intersection, where one was struck on the passenger side door by a 2007 Toyota Corolla, said police.
The cruiser was pushed into the eastbound lanes of Heritage Drive, where it hit two other vehicles waiting at the light.
The 70-year-old female driver of the Toyota was taken to hospital in stable condition, but her 92-year-old passenger died in Foothills Hospital on Sunday afternoon.
A male police officer suffered minor injuries.
"From witnesses and from the fact that all but one lane of traffic had actually stopped is a fairly strong indicator to us that he [the officer] was following protocol very closely," said deputy police chief Peter Davison Monday.
The police traffic section is investigating.
Brad Renfro Excluded From Oscar Tribute
Monday February 25 6:35 PM ET
Blogs were buzzing Monday with discussion of why Brad Renfro was left out of the Academy Awards tribute to Hollywood figures who died in the past year.
The troubled 25-year-old actor died Jan. 15 of a heroin and morphine overdose. Heath Ledger, killed by an overdose of prescription drugs one week later, appeared in a scene from "Brokeback Mountain" at the conclusion of the three-minute video tribute at Sunday night's Oscar ceremony.
"Unfortunately we cannot include everyone," said Leslie Unger, spokeswoman for the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. "Our goal is to honor individuals who worked in the many professions and trades of the motion picture industry, not just actors."
Hilary Swank introduced the Oscar segment, which featured 43 people including makeup artists, a stuntman and several Hollywood agents. Unger said it was not required that those honored be members of the Academy or past Oscar nominees.
USA Today blogger Whitney Matheson headlined a post Monday, "Why was Brad snubbed last night?" and Perez Hilton posted a mug shot of Renfro with the words "Oscar Snub."
TMZ speculated Renfro was not "feel-good enough" for Oscar, but public comments left on the site also pointed out that in contrast to Ledger, "Renfro wasn't a big enough star."
Unger shook off the suggestion that Renfro wasn't included because of his history with drugs. "I can't speak to what other people are going to think," Unger said. "We can't include everybody."
Renfro was most well-known for his titular role in 1993's "The Client" and had his last major roles more than a decade ago. He had appeared in smaller parts in recent years.
Oscar-nominated "Jaws" star Roy Scheider also was not included. His death on Feb. 10 outside the time frame of the tribute video, which covered Feb. 1, 2007 to Jan. 31, 2008.
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Copyright © 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Speaking of JAWS...
Austrian dies after being bitten by shark during dive off Florida
Tue Feb 26, 12:41 AM
By The Associated Press
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - An Austrian tourist died Monday after being bitten by a shark while diving near the Bahamas in waters that had been baited with bloody fish parts to attract the predators.
Markus Groh, 49, a Vienna lawyer and diving enthusiast, was on a commercial dive trip Sunday when he was bitten about 80 kilometres off Fort Lauderdale, said Karlick Arthur, Austrian counsel general in Miami.
Groh was in the open water without a cage or similar protection.
The crew aboard the Shear Water, of Riviera Beach-based Scuba Adventures, immediately called the U.S. coast guard, which received a mayday from the vessel, said Petty Officer 3rd Class Nick Ameen.
Groh was airlifted to a hospital, where he died. Groh was bitten on the leg, Ameen said but he could not be more specific about the extent of his injuries.
It was unclear what type of shark was involved in the attack. The shark escaped before anyone could identify the species.
The Miami-Dade Medical Examiner's Office declined comment, citing an ongoing investigation by the Miami-Dade Police Department. A telephone message left for police was not immediately returned.
A woman who answered the telephone at Scuba Adventures on Monday said the company had no comment.
The company's website says it offers the opportunity to get "face to face" with sharks. The site explains its hammerhead and tiger shark expeditions in the Bahamas are "unique shark trips...run exclusively for shark enthusiasts and photographers."
To ensure "the best results we will be 'chumming' the water with fish and fish parts," the website explains.
"Consequently, there will be food in the water at the same time as the divers. Please be aware that these are not 'cage' dives, they are open water experiences."
Chile police plane crashes in capital, kills 11
By Antonio de la Jara
Wed Feb 27, 9:00 PM ET
SANTIAGO (Reuters) - A small police plane crashed into a sports field in Chile's capital on Wednesday, killing at least 11 people including five who were exercising in a public park, officials said.
The plane crashed shortly after taking off from a nearby airfield. It had experienced technical difficulties and the pilot was attempting an emergency landing onto the field in Santiago's Penalolen municipality, police said.
Police said the plane's six occupants -- two flight instructors and four students aged 18 to 20 -- died.
Five other people, including a woman and her 4-year-old child, were killed on the ground on the playing field as they tried to escape the plane. Witnesses said it nose-dived into the area where they were exercising and burst into flames.
"I saw the plane hit some railings, I saw the flames and I saw people I knew screaming ... . The ladies were on the ground and we were throwing them wet towels," said Bernarda Espinoza, whose house sits 20 yards (meters) from where the Cessna plane crashed.
At least 10 people were injured on the field where the plane hit the ground. Some 30 grandmothers, mothers and children were there at the time.
"Grandmothers and children were doing aerobics. Most of them managed to escape, but some were trapped," one witness told local television.
Penalolen is a middle-class neighborhood in southeastern Santiago that has seen rapid growth in recent years.
(Reporting by Antonio de la Jara, additional reporting by Monica Vargas and Pav Jordan; Editing by Xavier Briand)
And, finally, it isn't only at funerals that you can most unexpectedly bite the bullet and the dust - it can also happen at a wedding, even your own (and not just figuratively or metaphorically either!)
NY police go on trial in 50-shot killing of groom
By Edith Honan Mon
Feb 25, 6:19 PM ET
NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York police who killed an unarmed black man with 50 shots on his wedding day were careless and desperate to make an arrest because their vice unit was about to be disbanded, a prosecutor said on Monday.
Two officers went on trial for manslaughter and a third for reckless endangerment in the death of Sean Bell, 23, who was killed in 2006 following a bachelor party at a strip club in a case generating outrage in much of New York's black community.
Civil rights activist Al Sharpton sat next to the fiance, Nicole Paultre, in a gallery packed with Bell's friends and relatives and police sympathetic to the defendants. Protesters outside, many of whom wanted the officers to face murder charges, held up signs numbered 1 to 50, chanting each number.
Demonstrators have called the case an example of police brutality toward blacks. One of the defendants is a black, one is black Hispanic and the third is white.
The case will be decided by a State Supreme Court judge because the officers waived their right to a jury trial, saying any jury in the borough of Queens would be biased against police due to intense media coverage.
On the night of the shooting, the officers were told by a superior officer, "This might be our last night together. Let's make it count,"' assistant district attorney Charles Testagrossa said in opening arguments.
He accused the officers of "carelessness verging on incompetence" and said that once the shooting began they "never paused to reassess."
The Club Enforcement Unit was eager to make a prostitution arrest, which would have shut the club down, Testagrossa said.
HINDSIGHT (is always 20/20, reputedly - but can it be 50/50 too...?
Defense lawyers countered that the officers were engaged in dangerous police work and lacked the benefit of hindsight.
Bell and two friends left his bachelor party in the early morning hours of his wedding day on November 25, 2006, and were followed to Bell's car by police who believed one of the men was going to fetch a gun to settle a dispute.
When police pulled their guns on Bell, he drove into one of them and rammed into an unmarked police van.
The defense lawyer for officer Michael Oliver, who fired 31 times by emptying his gun and reloading, faulted prosecutors for focusing on the number of shots and relying on hindsight.
"The fundamental flaw in the people's case is its fixation on the number of shots," James Cullerton told the judge.
Describing Oliver's mindset at time of the shooting, Cullerton said: "If he stopped, he would be looking down the barrel of a gun."
The lawyer for Gescard Isnora, the undercover detective who fired the first shot and 11 in total, urged the judge to strip politics from the hearing and portrayed his client as trying to shut down a "gritty, raunchy strip joint in a working-class community."
None of the three officers had ever fired their weapons before in the line of duty, defense lawyers said.
The fiance, Paultre, 23, wearing a black suit and appearing composed and soft-spoken, was called as the prosecution's first witness. Paultre said that she and Bell, the father of her two young daughters, had been high school sweethearts.
She said that she had attended a bridal shower at her mother's home on the night of Bell's death, and that he and six friends had planned his bachelor party at the last minute.
On what was to be their wedding day, Paultre said she went to the hospital with her mother and older sister to see Bell. When asked what condition he was in, Paultre broke down in tears. "He was in the morgue," she said.
(Editing by Daniel Trotta, Michelle Nichols and Sandra Maler)
May the many departed souls R.I.P.
And the many bereaved parties associated to all of these stories find solace also...
+++
It was shocking, just a few years ago, to hear some dignitary cry foul in the following terms: "Israel is killing Palestinians."
But now, some news HEADLINES are saying it too, quite openly and maybe even a tad matter-of-factly...
Israel kills 20 Palestinians in Gaza
By IBRAHIM BARZAK
and KARIN LAUB,
Associated Press Writers
Thu Feb 28, 5:48 PM ET
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - A bloody spike in Israel-Hamas fighting put the Israeli city of Ashkelon and its 110,000 residents at the center of an intensifying militant rocket barrage Thursday — and Israel's defense minister warned he would invade Gaza, if necessary, to halt the attacks.
Israel launched nearly a dozen airstrikes, killing 20 Palestinians, Gaza hospital officials said. The attacks included a not-so-veiled warning to Gaza's Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh — a missile strike on a guard post outside his home. Hamas leaders have been in hiding in recent weeks, though Israel has so far only targeted militants, not Hamas politicians.
The dead Thursday included members of rocket squads, as well as five children, ranging in age from 8 to 12, who their relatives said were playing soccer when they were killed in a missile strike.
Israel has been reluctant to invade Gaza, amid concerns of getting bogged down there, but Defense Minister Ehud Barak told his security chiefs Thursday that an offensive is a definite option. "The major ground operation is real and tangible. We are not afraid of it," Barak said, according to a participant who spoke on condition of anonymity because the top-level session was held in secrecy.
Barak also told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the British foreign minister in phone conversations that Israel would step up its response to the rocket fire, but a ground offensive wasn't imminent. Security officials said an invasion would have to wait until clouds clear in the spring.
The latest spike began Wednesday, when five Iranian-trained Hamas militants, including two rocket masterminds, were killed in an Israeli airstrike in southern Gaza. In retaliation, Hamas fired dozens of Gaza-produced Qassam rockets, as well as longer-range Iranian-made Grad rockets smuggled in via Egypt.
Several Grad rockets slammed into Ashkelon, 11 miles north of Gaza, on Thursday, including one that hit an apartment building, slicing through the roof and three floors below, and another that landed near a school, wounding a 17-year-old girl.
While more than two dozen rockets have hit the Ashkelon area in the past, most fell in open areas in the southern outskirts and did not cause damage. The latest round of rocket fire was the most intense so far, and police chief Uri Bar-Lev said Thursday it was the first time a building in Ashkelon was hit. On Wednesday, a rocket exploded in the parking lot of Ashkelon's Barzilai Hospital.
In the past, the Israeli border town of Sderot, with about 20,000 residents, had been Hamas' main target. In recent years, hundreds of Qassams have hit Sderot, just a mile from Gaza, and on Wednesday an Israeli father of four was killed by a rocket that hit a Sderot community college.
Ashkelon residents demanded better protection.
"We want a warning system, like they have in Sderot," one resident, Moshe Nissim, told Israel TV's Channel Two. "We have no protection from Palestinian attacks." The deputy director of Barzilai Hospital asked for fortifications for his emergency room, maternity ward and surgery departments.
Barak pledged Thursday to install the warning system in Ashkelon within hours, defense officials said.
A senior Israeli security official told The Associated Press the rockets fired into Ashkelon were Iranian-made imports, with a range of about 14 miles, although the military said some locally made rockets have fallen into the southern outskirts of the city.
The Grads are taken apart, smuggled into Gaza through tunnels and reassembled, and Hamas has only a limited supply, the official said on condition of anonymity, in line with briefing regulations.
However, Hamas is rapidly upgrading its Qassams, which it can mass-produce in Gaza. Hamas has hundreds of Qassams in stock, and by the end of the year, it will likely have extended the Qassam range to 12 miles, the security official said.
Qassams now have a range of 10 miles, and would fall just short of Ashkelon.
Israeli military analyst Shlomo Brom said Ashkelon could increasingly become a target once it can be hit by Qassams, not just the Iranian imports. This, in turn, would accelerate an Israeli invasion of Gaza, because "Israel cannot afford Ashkelon turning into a second Sderot," Brom said.
Maj. Avital Leibovich, an Israeli military spokeswoman, said residents of Ashkelon "are already in the circle of warfare," and there is concern that more Israeli cities could be put in rocket range.
Hamas, which seized control of Gaza by force in June, appears to have little to lose. Israel and Egypt keep Gaza's borders closed, making it hard for the Islamic militants to rule. Hamas hopes to push Israel to negotiate a cease-fire, along with a new border crossing deal, but apparently feels it can also survive an offensive.
The Israeli army has U.S.-made F-16 warplanes and Apache helicopters, as well as pilotless drones, in its arsenal. Palestinian witnesses said all three types of aircraft were used in the recent attacks.
Hamas officials struck a defiant tone Thursday. "We will never have equipment comparable to our enemy, but we are working all the time to have enough to make any aggression a regrettable adventure for the enemy," said Abu Obeida, a spokesman for the Hamas military wing, Izzedine al-Qassam.
Since Wednesday, 31 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli missile strikes, including 14 civilians, among them eight children, according to Palestinian hospital officials. The youngest was a 6-month-old boy, Mohammed al-Borai, whose funeral was held Thursday.
On Thursday, Israel carried out more than 10 airstrikes in northern and central Gaza, beginning just after midnight and stretching well into the afternoon, Palestinians said.
The army said it was targeting rocket squads, and blamed militants for operating in populated areas. Civilian casualties were unintended, the army said.
AP photos showed rockets being launched from densely populated areas in northern Gaza. At nightfall Thursday, Hamas said it had fired 82 rockets since Wednesday, including 51 at Sderot.
One missile strike killed two Palestinian brothers and their two cousins who were playing soccer in a field in the town of Jebaliya, their relatives said. A 12-year-old boy who was nearby later died of his wounds, medics said.
Later Thursday, a helicopter attacked a Hamas police post near the home of Haniyeh, the Hamas prime minister, in the Shati refugee camp. One person was killed and four people were wounded, officials said.
Another Israeli airstrike late Thursday hit an electric company vehicle in Khan Younis, killing two workmen, medics said. The Israeli military said they hit a car carrying militants.
Among the militants killed Thursday was Hamza al-Haya, the son of Hamas lawmaker Khalil al-Haya. The elder al-Haya, one of Hamas' top figures in Gaza, has escaped assassination attempts, including an Israeli strike that killed his brother last year.
Visiting the morgue Thursday, Khalil al-Haya said he was proud his son had lost his life. "This is the 10th member of my family to receive the honor of martyrdom," he said.
In Tokyo, visiting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Israel will go after the militants. "We will reach out for the terrorists and we will attack and we will try to stop them," he said.
Rice, who briefly met with Olmert in Tokyo, said Hamas rocket attacks "need to stop," but also expressed concern for the humanitarian situation in Gaza and urged calm on all sides.
Israel's public security minister, Avi Dichter, visited Sderot Thursday, but was forced to cut short a news conference when an air raid siren went off and his guards rushed him to a concrete shelter. Before Dichter arrived in the town, two people were hurt by rocket fire, including one of his bodyguards.
Dichter told reporters he had no quick solution for the rocket attacks, but rejected suggestions of opening a dialogue with Hamas, which Israel considers a terrorist group.
___
Karin Laub reported from Tel Aviv, Israel.
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Palestinian children surround the body of 6-month-old Palestinian baby Mohammed al-Borai, who was killed when an Israeli aircraft blasted Hamas government offices and metal shops in the Gaza Strip late Wednesday, before his funeral in Gaza City, Thursday, Feb. 28, 2008. Seventeen Palestinians and one Israeli man were killed in the last two days of fighting between Israel and the Palestinians. The bloodshed threatened to worsen the ongoing violence in the area, which involves near-daily Palestinian rocket attacks from Gaza and harsh Israeli reprisals. (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra)
AP Photo: Palestinian children surround the body of 6-month-old Palestinian baby Mohammed al-Borai, who was killed when...
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The most shocking news in the past 24-to-48 hours though, as far as I am concerned, is the story of this nine month-old toddler BEATEN TO DEATH by his 19 year-old mother and 26 year-old father (presumably - possible step-dad, yes...) who deposited the newborn in an emergency ward and then took a powder...
Police have NOW (finally) issued an arrest warrant for the two unfit parents - and the manhunt is on, in the Montreal QC area...
It is difficult to use the same hackneyed "R.I.P." formula to this obviously very much unwanted child whose cries were met with such violence that the tiny being could not withstand it... (They did not merely "shake the baby" - no.)
I hope they are caught ASAP
and that the authorities there (notorious for their miscarriage of justice) will throw the book at these two.
Alas, since they are looking to release the murderer of Linda Quinn (slain in 1985; a heinous crime as it was, that took place in the area of Huntingdon QC) I guess I can safely state that the criminal justice system is MADDENED.
Linda Quinn was 23 years-old and PREGNANT when she was tortured, stabbed, hung by her ankles and left to be bitten by a pitbull several times before she finally died...
And the man who did this to her, Raymond Steele, was her trusted mentor and life coach - a fraudulent monster who, 23 years later, would walk away freely...
And back to the scene of the sickening crime...
As if nothing happened...
SICK justice.
Get it right, with the toddler's murderers - at least.
LIFE.
WITHOUT PAROLE.
Former Model Found Dead In Paris River
French Model Katoucha Niane Had Been Missing Since January
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PARIS Feb. 29, 2008
Model Katoucha sports a Picasso-inspired long dress during legendary fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent's farewell show in this Jan. 22, 2002 file photo at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris. (AP)
(AP) The body of Katoucha Niane, one of the first African women to attain international stardom as a model and a vocal opponent of female genital mutilation, was found in the Seine River, police said Friday.
Known simply as Katoucha, the former top model for Yves Saint Laurent and other top designers was found Thursday near the Garigliano bridge in Paris, judicial police in Paris said.
An autopsy showed no signs of foul play, pointing to the possibility that the 47-year-old may have fallen accidentally into the river, they said.
She had been missing since January and was last seen returning home from a party. She lived in a houseboat near Paris' Alexandre III bridge, and her handbag was later found on the boat.
The Guinean-born model told The Associated Press in 1994 that she ran away to Europe at 17 aiming to be a model. Her big break came when Jules-Francois Crahay, then the designer at Lanvin, spotted her in a line-up. The label hired her as a fitting model. Her first catwalk modeling was for Thierry Mugler at the start of the 1980s.
After quitting the runway, she turned to speaking out actively against female circumcision, describing her own experience at age 9 in a book, "Katoucha, In My Flesh," which was published last year.
"I will never get the incomparable pain out of my head," she wrote in the book, which she dedicated to her three children. In the book, she also detailed wild nights of partying, alcohol and drugs.
Vanity Fair's fashion and style director, Michael Roberts, said Katoucha was "one those girls who used her fame to spotlight the misfortunes of others."
"She always seemed so gracious and very lovely," he said. "She was sunny and she was bright, and I liked her a lot."
Katoucha set up her own label in 1994 after years of modeling for the likes of Christian Lacroix and Saint Laurent. Singers Cher and France's Johnny Hallyday were among the stars who turned out for her show.
"I don't pretend to be like Lacroix, Saint Laurent or the others," she said at the time. "But I was certainly in a great school by wearing their clothes and going to the fittings. I learned several basic lessons, including: Don't cut the fabric until you've got the 'toile,' or heavy linen prototype, just right."
Katoucha was the daughter of Djibril Tamsir Niane, an archaeologist and writer. She said that her father was initially disappointed that she didn't become "a professional intellectual, with a university degree," but later reconciled to her other successes.
In the months before her death, Katoucha took on her first film role, playing a beautiful and rebellious woman not unlike herself, said Leandre-Alain Baker, director of "Ramata." Filming is complete but a release date has not yet been set.
"She's marvelous in the role," Baker said.
He also said he sensed Katoucha could never entirely free herself from painful childhood experiences - a struggle sometimes apparent in her emotional shifts.
"She could go right from laughter to anger," Baker said. "But she always came back ... and I attribute that to her past, what she experienced and lived through."
Associated Press writers Joelle Diderich, Jean-Pierre Verges and Devorah Lauter in Paris contributed to this report.
By John Leicester
© MMVIII The Associated Press.
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R.I.P. Katoucha Niane
Grand lady of Guinea - you made your nation proud while probably making enemies in it too... You were vocal about certain things and opposed them publicly and I wouldn't rule out foul play in this... I hope justice is served in this case - and, if it truly was but an accident, that you had no unresolved issues in your life, Katoucha.
None is ever ready to leave - it is always too soon, too abrupt - but we can, hopefully, depart at a time in life when "everything has been taken care of"...
And I hope it was the case for Miss Niane.
Now, for a forgotten item I should have included here 20 days ago...
As it is an old favorite of mine, to boot...
Howard the Duck creator Steve Gerber dies
Last Updated:
Saturday, February 16, 2008 |
10:29 AM ET
The Associated Press
Steve Gerber, the comic book writer and creator whose signature character was the alienated, cigar-chomping Howard the Duck, has died. He was 60.
Gerber, who also co-created Marvel's Omega the Unknown and created the 1980s animated series Thundarr the Barbarian, suffered from pulmonary fibrosis.
He died Sunday in a Las Vegas hospital from complications related to the disease, said Mary Skrenes, a friend and writing partner on Omega and other comics.
The Howard the Duck series became a fast hit after its January 1976 debut on Marvel and remains a cult favourite. Its lead, a disgruntled duck from another universe with a bombshell sidekick named Beverly (Thunder-Thighs) Switzler, was hailed as both smart and subversive.
The adjectives could be applied to Gerber, Skrenes said.
"Howard was his voice. Steve was able to do social commentary and sort of sneak it up on you," she said.
"Sometimes it was obvious what the message was there, and other times it was really subtle because it took place in a mystical realm or outer space."
Or in Cleveland, where Howard was a lone talking duck "trapped in a world he never made!" according to the comic's tagline.
Gerber split with Marvel in 1978 amid a dispute over the rights to the character. He sued the company and settled out of court.
Worked on TV series
Skrenes said Gerber was not closely involved in George Lucas's 1986 Howard the Duck film, which fared poorly at the box office.
Gerber also worked in television as a story editor on G.I. Joe and Dungeons & Dragons.
More recently, Gerber and Skrenes created Hard Time for DC Comics, the story of a 15-year-old boy convicted in a Columbine-like school shooting who discovers he has special powers.
Gerber was working on a revival of the DC Comics Dr. Fate series at the time of his death.
"He was the kind of guy people would give an old, moribund idea to and he would come up with a fresh idea for it," said Mark Evanier, a friend.
Gerber was born Sept. 20, 1947, in St. Louis, Mo., and received a bachelor's degree from St. Louis University before joining Marvel as an assistant editor in 1972.
© The Canadian Press, 2008
The Canadian Press
R.I.P. Steve Gerber
Just like Roy Thomas and his Justa Lotta Animals and Zoo Crew parodies, Scott Shaw's Captain Carrot and Sergio Aragones' entire body of work, Steve Gerber's ducks (Howard and Destroyer) went that extra mile that neither Daffy nor Donald ever could. Plus, his heroic creations (Omega and Thundarr) and the other such material he handled (The Defenders and several DC books) were above the norm.
It is unfortunate that we won't get to see his stamp on a revitalized Doctor Fate, as it was planned - then again, Gerber is much better off in Heaven than at either DC or Marvel...
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Son of Greg Pruitt, Browns RB, shot
SHAKER HEIGHTS, Ohio,
Feb. 26 (UPI) --
Greg Pruitt Jr., the son of Greg Pruitt, a former running back with the Cleveland Browns and Los Angeles Raiders, was shot and critically wounded this week.
The shooting occurred in a house in Shaker Heights, a Cleveland suburb, on Sunday night, The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported. Police said that no one had been charged and the shooting remains under investigation.
Pruitt remained in the surgical intensive care unit at Huron Hospital after an operation Monday morning, WEWS-TV reported.
The younger Pruitt was a star at Shaker Heights High School and North Carolina Central University. In 2007, he signed a rookie free agent contract with the Baltimore Ravens.
The elder Pruitt went to the Pro Bowl four times while he was with the Browns and once after he joined the Raiders.
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