PFC. LAVENA JOHNSON: “THE SILENT TRUTH”

I originally posted on the late Pfc. Lavena Johnson back in 2007, a young military woman whose death was ruled a suicide, even though military doctors conclusion ruled her death not a suicide. All evidence presented to date shows that she was brutally raped and murdered.

Pfc. LaVena Johnson, private first class,  died near Balad, Iraq, on July 19, 2005, just eight days shy of her twentieth birthday. She was the first woman soldier from Missouri to die while serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.

 

Here is an update on her case, from Midtown Films entitled “The Silent Truth”.  It addresses the surrounding disinformation concerning Pfc. Johnson’s death, with the exhumation of her remains, and the quest of her grieving parents to find closure in the loss of their beloved daughter. The silent truth that cries out for Pfc. Lavena Johnson that she receive justice and that her name is cleared.

Nearly seven years later, her death still remains a cold case.

 

IN REMEMBRANCE: 3-11-2012

FRISNER AUGUSTIN, HAITIAN VODOU DRUMMER

By JON PARELES

Published: March 10, 2012

Frisner Augustin, a Haitian vodou master drummer whose deep knowledge of traditional rhythms and leadership of the Brooklyn-based Troupe Makandal made him a major force in preserving and popularizing his Afro-Haitian heritage, died on Feb. 28 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He was 63.

Librado Romero/The New York Times

Frisner Augustin, a vodou drummer, in 1998.

The cause was a brain hemorrhage, said La Troupe Makandal’s executive director, Lois Wilcken.

Mr. Augustin had an encyclopedic knowledge of the rhythms of vodou (the word is the Haitian Creole spelling of voodoo), in which more than 100 spirits are represented and summoned, each by a distinctive rhythm.

Leading La Troupe Makandal, a drum and dance group, and performing in both vodou ceremonies and secular events, Mr. Augustin devoted his career both to preserving those rhythms and to battling negative stereotypes and misconceptions about vodou. His personal style was meticulous not only about rhythm but also about the melodies made by drum tones. “He would say the drum is like a piano,” Ms. Wilcken said.

In 1999, the National Endowment for the Arts named Mr. Augustin a Heritage Fellow, the nation’s highest award for traditional artists.

Mr. Augustin was born in Port-au-Prince on March 1, 1948, to a poor family. He began drumming as a child on water buckets and whatever else came to hand. An uncle was a drummer, and after watching and listening to him, Mr. Augustin began playing with drum groups while he attended a trade school for welding. He was illiterate throughout his life, but by the time he was 10 or 11, he had learned parts for the various drums in vodou ensembles and had already begun to play the maman, the lead drum, despite his youth. “They had to put me in the chair and put a rope around the chair to hold me and the drum up,” he once recalled.

In 1961, he left welding behind to become a full-time musician. He was initiated as a ountògi, a sacred drummer, during his teens in Haiti, and as an oungan sou pwen, on the threshold of vodou priesthood, in 1984 in the Bronx.

Mr. Augustin immigrated to New York City in 1972 and worked with various groups as a drummer; he also began his lifelong second career as a drumming teacher. In 1981 he took over as artistic director of La Troupe Makandal, a Haitian ensemble named after a Haitian revolutionary and mystic, when it relocated from Port-au-Prince to New York.

La Troupe Makandal has performed for both Haitian and world-music audiences. When it brought abridged vodou ceremonies to public stages, the rhythms were so traditional and intense that unplanned spiritual possessions sometimes took place in secular spaces. The troupe also performs choreographed programs devoted to Haitian history and culture. It has made four albums of traditional Afro-Haitian music: “A Trip to Vodou,” “Èzili,” “The Drums of Vodou” and “Prepare.”

In 1983, Mr. Augustin began teaching the Haitian Drum Workshop at Hunter College, with instruction not only in vodou but also in other Haitian traditions. He also taught drumming at regular workshops in Brooklyn neighborhoods and worked with a Haitian-American children’s dance company, Tonel Lakay.

When the Rolling Stones began their Voodoo Lounge stadium tour in Washington in 1994, Mr. Augustin was a member of the vodou drum group that opened the concert. He also worked on the soundtrack of the Jonathan Demme film “Beloved,” and appears on albums by the genre-defying composer Kip Hanrahan and on a 2011 album, “Route de Frères,” by the Haitian-American jazz drummer Andrew Cyrille. In 1998, when the New York folklore group City Lore inducted Mr. Augustin into its People’s Hall of Fame, Mr. Demme called him “the Arnold Schwarzenegger of transcendental drumming.”

A year later, Mr. Augustin received the National Endowment of the Arts fellowship. “He wanted his drums to both call the spirits and to speak to a broad public,” said a statement by Rocco Landesman, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Mr. Augustin, who was married and divorced once, is survived by seven children — Garry Augustin, Gregory Augustin, Dominique Augustin Rosa, Johnny Augustin, Nicolas Breland, Niguel Breland and Courtney Mathurin — and five grandchildren. La Troupe Makandal will continue to perform, with a lineup including longtime students of Mr. Augustin.

SOURCE

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LEONARDO CIMINO, A DISTINCTIVE ACTOR

By DANIEL E. SLOTNIK

Published: March 10, 2012

Leonardo Cimino, who once thought his singular appearance would make an acting career improbable but who ended up spending more than 60 years as an in-demand character actor whose roles included gangsters, grandfathers, the pope, Vincent van Gogh and “Scary German Guy,” died on March 3 at his home in Woodstock, N.Y. He was 94.

NBC, via Photofest

Leonardo Cimino in the 1983 television mini-series “V.”

The cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, his wife, Sharon Powers, said.

Mr. Cimino studied acting, directing and modern dance at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater. But he thought that his looks — he was slight of build and had a distinctively thin face — might make it hard to win steady roles when he was trying to choose a profession in the 1940s. Those looks, however, turned out to be his greatest asset.

“He doesn’t look like anybody else,” Ms. Powers said. “If you want a Leo Cimino, you want a Leo Cimino.”

He was taking dance classes with Martha Graham when José Ferrer, who was directing and starring in a 1946 revival of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” asked if he would play a part. Mr. Cimino became a regular under Ferrer, which eventually led to more roles.

On Broadway Mr. Cimino was in the 1962 adaptation of E. M. Forster’s “Passage to India” and a 1985 revival of “The Iceman Cometh,” among other parts. Off Broadway he performed Shakespeare with the Public Theater, notably a 1975 performance as Egeon in “The Comedy of Errors” alongside Ted Danson and Danny DeVito. He also starred as Vincent van Gogh in “Vincent” at the Cricket Theater in 1959.

“Leonardo Cimino’s van Gogh is a small, lively, appealing figure — appealing because he does not ask for pity,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times.

He won an Obie Award for his performance as the disturbed and morose Smerdyakov in a 1958 production of “The Brothers Karamazov.”

On television, he appeared in the original version of the science-fiction mini-series “V” and in shows like “Naked City,” “Kojak” and “Law & Order.” His many movies included “Dune,” “The Freshman” and “Moonstruck.” He played the pope in the 1982 film “Monsignor” and the aforementioned “Scary German Guy” in “The Monster Squad.”

Leonardo Anthony Cimino was born in Manhattan on Nov. 4, 1917, to Andrea Cimino, a tailor, and his wife, Leonilda. He began playing the violin as a child, and studied at Juilliard as a teenager.

He landed with the second wave at Normandy during World War II.

Other than his wife, Mr. Cimino has no immediate survivors.

When Mr. Cimino was dabbling in dance, he spent a few months as a substitute teacher, filling in for Sidney Lumet at the High School for the Performing Arts.

His final role was in 2007 alongside Ethan Hawke, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Albert Finney in the film “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” Mr. Lumet’s last film.

SOURCE

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JIMMY ELLIS, LEAD SINGER IN DANCE BAND TRAMMPS

By DANIEL E. SLOTNIK

Published: March 8, 2012

Jimmy Ellis, the soulful lead singer of the Trammps, whose 1970s hit “Disco Inferno” was immortalized in the film “Saturday Night Fever,” died on Thursday in Rock Hill, S.C. He was 74.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The Trammps, from left, Earl Young (seated), Harold Wade, Jimmy Ellis, Stanley Wade and Robert Upchurch.

The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, Erika Stinson, his daughter, said.

Mr. Ellis’s melodious voice overlaid the funky guitar riffs and driving bass and drums of the Trammps’s dance music. He sang lead on most of the group’s songs, backed by the bass singer Earl Young, and later harmonized with Robert Upchurch, who joined the band in the mid-1970s.

The Trammps were formed in the early ’70s, according to their keyboard player and manager, Edward Cermanski. Mr. Cermanski said the second “m” in the group’s name came from the days when Mr. Ellis and his friends sang on street corners.

“The police called them tramps,” he said. “So they said they wanted to be high-class tramps, with two ‘m’s in the name.”

Their first recording was a remake of one of Judy Garland’s signature songs, “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart,” which reached No. 17 on the R&B charts. They went on to have hits like “Hold Back the Night,” and in 1975 were signed by Atlantic Records, which released seminal disco records by the group like “Where the Happy People Go.”

The Trammps peaked with the album “Disco Inferno,” whose title track climbed to No. 11 on the Billboard pop chart in 1977. It became emblematic of the disco era when it was used as background music in an extended John Travolta dance sequence in the 1977 movie “Saturday Night Fever.”

The movie’s soundtrack rocketed to No. 1 on the pop chart and became the highest-selling album of all time until Michael Jackson surpassed it with “Thriller.” The soundtrack won a Grammy for album of the year in 1979. The Trammps, along with every performer featured on the album, received Grammys.

James Thomas Ellis II was born on Nov. 15, 1937, in Rock Hill, S.C. He sang gospel as a teenager in St. Mary’s Church, graduated from Emmett Scott High School and left for Philadelphia to sing with R&B groups like the Volcanoes and the Exceptions, who had a popular single called “Down by the Ocean.”

In addition to his daughter, Mr. Ellis, who lived in Rock Hill, is survived by his wife, Beverly; three brothers, Johnny, George Robert and Charles; a sister, Alice Ruth; a son, James III; eight grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Except for a hiatus of several years, Mr. Ellis toured with the Trammps until 2010.

SOURCE

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DONALD M. PAYNE, FIRST BLACK CANDIDATE ELECTED TO CONGRESS FROM NEW JERSEY

By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ

Published: March 6, 2012

Correction Appended

Representative Donald M. Payne, a former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus who achieved a long-held goal of becoming the first black congressman from New Jersey, died on Tuesday in Livingston, N.J. He was 77.

Susan Walsh/Associated Press

Representative Donald Payne of New Jersey, in 2009.

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The cause was complications of colon cancer, his office said. He died at St. Barnabas Medical Center.

Mr. Payne, a Democrat, announced his cancer diagnosis in February but ruled out taking a leave of absence, saying he planned to seek re-election because his doctors expected him to make a full recovery.

He had declared his ambition to become New Jersey’s first black congressman as early as 1974, when he was an Essex County legislator. But he was defeated in 1980 and 1986 in primary races to unseat Representative Peter W. Rodino Jr., the longtime dean of the state’s Congressional delegation and a popular figure in the heavily Democratic and largely black 10th Congressional District, which includes sections of Essex, Hudson and Union Counties.

It was not until Mr. Rodino chose not to seek a 21st term, in 1988, that Mr. Payne saw his opportunity. “I want to be a congressman to serve as a role model for the young people I talk to on the Newark street corners,” Mr. Payne said at the time. “I want them to see there are no barriers to achievement. I want to give them a reason to try.”

In the general election, he handily defeated his Republican opponent, Michael Webb, by a vote of 83,520 to 13,511.

“Nothing is as powerful as a dream whose time has come,” Mr. Payne said after the victory. “Sometimes a political leader is marching a little in front or a little behind the people. But once in a while the marcher and the drumbeat are in exactly the same cadence, and then, finally, good things happen.”

He had voiced that sentiment two years earlier, in his second bid to unseat Mr. Rodino, maintaining that a largely black district was entitled to be represented by one of its own. After his 1988 victory, Mr. Payne said he was aware of how Mr. Rodino had been a source of pride for Italian-Americans, earning national recognition as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee during impeachment proceedings against President Richard M. Nixon. Mr. Payne said he wanted to instill the same kind of pride in blacks.

In Congress, Mr. Payne was a low-key and unassuming presence who nonetheless made a mark in a number of areas, including education and global affairs.

A former teacher, he advanced policies that sought to make college more affordable. He led efforts to cut interest rates on Stafford loans for college students and increase the size of need-based Pell grants.

As a member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, he wrote legislation that sought to provide famine relief to the war-torn Darfur region of Sudan. He was also a founder of the Malaria Caucus in Congress and helped secure billions of dollars in foreign aid for treating H.I.V., AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.

In a statement, President Obama said Mr. Payne had “made it his mission to fight for working families.” The state’s governor, Chris Christie, called Mr. Payne “a great role model for every person in New Jersey who aspires to public service.”

Donald Milford Payne was born on July 16, 1934, to William Evander Payne and the former Norma Garrett in Newark’s predominantly Italian-American North Ward, in a section called Doodletown. His father held jobs as a chauffeur and a dockworker. “I didn’t have a black teacher all through elementary and high school, until my senior year,” Mr. Payne once recalled.

A graduate of Seton Hall University, he taught English and social studies and coached football in Newark at South Side High School (now Malcolm X Shabazz High School). Before entering politics he held executive positions at the Prudential Insurance Company and Urban Data Systems, a computer forms company founded by his older brother, William. He was also the first black president of the National Council of Y.M.C.A.’s.

Mr. Payne developed a passion for politics early. At 19 he followed his brother into Democratic politics, running his successful campaign to become the North Ward’s first black district leader. His brother was 21. In 1972, Mr. Payne was elected to the Essex County Board of Chosen Freeholders. A decade later, he won a seat on the Newark Municipal Council.

He was in his 12th term in the House when he died. In several of his later campaigns, he ran without any Republican opposition.

Mr. Payne was chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus from 1995 to 1997.

He married the former Hazel Johnson in 1958. She died in 1963. His survivors include a son, Donald Jr., a Newark councilman; two daughters, Wanda Payne and Nicole Payne; four grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.

Correction: March 8, 2012

Because of an editing error, an obituary on Wednesday about Representative Donald M. Payne, the first black congressman from New Jersey, referred incorrectly to his membership in the Congressional Black Caucus. He was a member from the time he joined Congress, in 1989, until his death — not just from 1995 to 1997. (Those were the years he was chairman of the caucus.)

SOURCE

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WILLIAM HEIRENS, THE ‘LIPSTICK KILLER’

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: March 7, 2012

William Heirens, the notorious “Lipstick Killer” who in 1946 confessed to three horrific murders in Chicago and then spent the rest of his life — more than 65 years — in prison despite questions about his guilt, was found dead on Monday in the Dixon Correctional Center in Dixon, Ill. He was 83.

Associated Press

William Heirens, center, in a Chicago courtroom in July 1946.

Peter Thompson/Associated Press

Mr. Heirens served more than 65 years in prison in Illinois.

He was pronounced dead at the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical Center, where an autopsy was to be performed, the Cook County medical examiner’s office said. Mr. Heirens was known to have had diabetes.

Mr. Heirens’ notoriety stemmed from the separate killings of two women, Josephine Ross and Frances Brown, in 1945. At the scene of the second murder, that of Miss Brown, someone had used lipstick to scrawl on a wall: “For heaven’s sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself.”

The reports of a “lipstick killer” terrified Chicago as the press took note of other unsolved murders of women. Then, about two weeks after the Brown murder, on Jan. 7, 1946, a 6-year-old girl named Suzanne Degnan was discovered missing from her bedroom at her North Side home. A ladder was found outside the window. The police later determined that the killer had strangled her and taken the body to the basement of a nearby building, where it was dismembered. Her head was found in a sewer; other body parts were found scattered about the neighborhood.

The newspapers called the killing the crime of the century, and though the police questioned a parade of suspects, there was no arrest.

Almost six months later, Mr. Heirens (pronounced HIGH-rens), a 17-year-old student at the University of Chicago, was apprehended at the scene of a burglary in the girl’s neighborhood. The police charged him with the murder after determining that his fingerprints were on a $20,000 ransom note that had been left behind at her home.

While he was in custody, The Chicago Tribune, citing what it called “unimpeachable sources,” reported that Mr. Heirens had confessed to the Degnan murder. Four other Chicago newspapers published similar articles, basing them on The Tribune’s account. The outcry against him mounted.

Mr. Heirens, who said he was beaten and given “truth serum” in jail, disputed the newspaper accounts, saying he was about to sign a confession in exchange for one life term but rebelled at “being forced to lie to save myself.” Prosecutors then charged him with the Brown and Ross murders, saying they had incriminating physical evidence against him, including crime-scene fingerprints and a handwriting analysis. Offered three consecutive life terms in exchange for a guilty plea, he accepted, on the advice of his lawyers. Later he said he had done so only to avoid a death sentence if he had gone to trial.

“I confessed to live,” he said.

When he did confess, his memory seemed ragged. Time after time during the plea bargaining, prosecutors brought up details from The Tribune article, which he then incorporated into his testimony. Mr. Heirens recanted his confession soon afterward and maintained his innocence for the rest of his life while being denied parole or clemency numerous times. He questioned the validity of the fingerprints and other evidence, as have public interest lawyers who supported him.

In one clemency petition in 2002, his lawyers from the Northwestern University Center on Wrongful Convictions alleged more “prosecutorial misconduct, incompetent defense counsel, unprecedented prejudicial pretrial publicity, junk science, probably false confessions and mistaken eyewitness identification than any other case we have studied.” But others could not ignore his detailed admissions of guilt, even if he had retracted them. “He is the yardstick by which all evil is judged,” Thomas Epach, a Chicago police official, said at the 2002 clemency hearing.

Suzanne Degnan’s family fought all efforts to release him. Betty Finn, Suzanne’s older sister, said at the 2002 hearing, “Think of the worse nightmare that you cannot put out of your mind, you’re not allowed to put out of your mind.”

William George Heirens was born on Nov. 15, 1928, in Evanston, Ill. His father’s flower business failed, and the family teetered on the edge of poverty. In interviews, William said that his parents had fought frequently and that he had burglarized houses to relieve the tension he felt at home. He did not try to sell the things he stole, he said.

He was placed in two Roman Catholic youth detention centers. At the second, he proved to be an excellent student, skipping his senior year of high school. He was admitted to the University of Chicago at 16, with plans to major in engineering. In interviews, Mr. Heirens said his mother had led him to believe that sex was dirty. When he kissed a girl, he said, he would burst into tears and vomit. He said one reason he broke into houses was to play with women’s underwear.

In the burglary in which he was arrested, the police testified that he had aimed a gun at an officer and twice pulled the trigger, but that the weapon misfired. He was additionally convicted of assault with the intention of killing a police officer.

After Mr. Heirens went to jail, his parents and brother changed their names to Hill. He left no known survivors.

While serving one of the nation’s longest prison terms, Mr. Heirens became the first prisoner in Illinois to earn a degree from a four-year college. He also managed the prison garden factory and set up several education programs. In recent years, his diabetes damaged his eyesight, and he used a wheelchair. He told The New York Times in 2002 that he had learned that prison friendships were fleeting.

“Most of them, you hear for a little while, and then they kind of fade out,” he said. “Usually when they get out, they try to forget they were ever in.”

SOURCE

SKYWATCH: JUPITER MEETS VENUS, EXOTIC NEW PARTICLES?, AND MORE

News Observing Photo Gallery Magazine Archive Shop at Sky

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NASA / Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab

Bulletin at a Glance News Observing This Week’s Sky at a Glance Community

Distant Galaxies Hint at Exotic Physics

March 7, 2012 | Observations of galaxies shooting high-powered jets from their cores suggest the existence of a hypothetical particle. While speculative, the results could mean that photons aren’t as dependable as we envision them to be: sometimes, they become an entirely different particle. > read more

New Fuel for Type Ia Supernova Debate

March 6, 2012 | The origin of the stellar explosions known as Type Ia supernovae has been a topic of hot debate for decades. A new study adds fuel to the fire. > read more

Sky & Telescope April 2012

| Sky & Telescope‘s April 2012 issue is now available to digital subscribers. > read more

Observing

Jupiter Meets Venus

March 8, 2012 | Jupiter and Venus are about to cross paths in the sky. From March 9th to 17th the two planets will be within 5° of each other, fitting in a single field of view through most binoculars. > read more

Mars Takes Center Stage

March 5, 2012 | The Red Planet (actually yellow-orange) is the brilliant “star” climbing steadily in the east these evenings. Now’s your best chance to examine our next-out planetary neighbor. > read more

Tour March’s Sky by Eye and Ear!

February 28, 2012 | Venus and Jupiter form a dazzling pair after sunset, but they’re just the opening act in a sky full of bright planets and late-winter stars. > read more

Comet Garradd Stays the Course

February 7, 2012 | A first-time visitor to the inner solar system is slowly returning to the evening sky after making a dramatic and beautiful pairing with the globular cluster Messier 92. > read more

Jupiter: Big, Bright, and Beautiful

September 23, 2011 | The “King of Planets,” which will dominate the evening sky from late 2011 through early 2012, is a captivating sight no matter how you look at it. > read more

This Week’s Sky at a Glance

Sky & Telescope diagram

This Week’s Sky at a Glance

March 9, 2012 | The striking Venus-Jupiter show in the early-evening sky culminates this week, as the two brightest planets pass just 3° apart. > read more

Community

S&T: Sean Walker

Changes in Latitude

February 27, 2012 | Hundreds of observers, who’d grown tired of cold, dreary midwinter skies, headed to the Florida Keys last week. There they viewed the heavens in shirtsleeve weather at the 28th annual Winter Star Party. > read more

COLORLINES: 5 MILLION VOTERS MAY LOSE VOTING RIGHTS

Five Million Voters May Lose Rights in the 2012 Elections

Brentin Mock looks at two states in the Super Tuesday primaries—Georgia and Tennessee—that are part of a wave of states that created troubling voting laws following the tea party Republican victories of 2010.

Follow Brentin Mock’s voting rights blog throughout election season.

How Can We Help Kids Define What Is and Isn’t Healthy Sexuality?

Akiba Solomon offers some starting points to help you have healthy sexuality discussions with youth in the age of video games that promote rape.

Robert Glasper Talks About Making Jazz for a New Generation

The pianist and producer sat down with Jamilah King to talk about how he’s successfully blended jazz with hip-hop.

Also: Will you be at SXSW? Connect with Colorlines.com

There Are Lies, Damned Lies and Andrew Breitbart The rightwing hitman’s post-humous attack on President Obama has proven a dud. So his cronies are trying to smear the late, revered race studies scholar Derrick Bell instead.

How a Racist Email Reveals the Grand Old Party Has Become a Petty Affair It’s no great insight to point out it’s a tough election year for the Republican Party. But for all the hours of analysis spent sussing out how the GOP arrived in this place, a federal judge in Montana offered this week what is perhaps the most succinct explanation.

Why More Americans Can’t Access Healthy Food Why don’t more people have access to healthy food? In a new book, journalist Tracie McMillian looks beyond fast food restaurants to untangle a web that’s proven deadly for people living in poverty.

The Unique Importance of This Year’s International Women’s Day As we celebrate, we’re taking a look at how women around the world fight from places of fury, and love.

As Election 2012 Nears, Hate Groups at Record HighThe rise of hate groups is believed to be fueled by antagonism toward President Obama, resentment over changing racial demographics and the slumped economy.

Lakota Indians Block ‘Keystone XL Pipeline’ Trucks in Six-Hour Standoff Five Lakotas on Pine Ridge Indian land in South Dakota were arrested Monday after attempting to block two tar sands pipeline trucks from entering their land.

Race in the News–All Day, Every Day, Right /NOW

News happens all day, every day–so we’ve launched a breaking news blog to help you keep up.

Colorlines.com/NOW follows the latest developments in everything from politics to pop culture, from the economy to the latest viral videos–all while facing the reality that race matters to today’s news.

HATEWATCH: TERROR, MURDER CHARGES UNVEILED IN NORWAY RAMPAGE

Terror, murder charges unveiled in Norway rampage

March 7, 2012 7:53 AM

Anders Behring Breivik, a right-wing extremist who confessed to a bombing and mass shooting that killed 77 people, arrives for a detention hearing at a court in Oslo, Norway, Feb. 6, 2012. (AP Photo/Scanpix Norway)

Massacre in Norway

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(AP) OSLO, Norway – Anders Behring Breivik was indicted Wednesday on terror and murder charges for slaying 77 people in a bomb and shooting rampage, but prosecutors said the confessed killer likely won’t go to prison for Norway’s worst peacetime massacre.

Prosecutors said they consider the 33-year-old right-wing extremist psychotic and will seek a sentence of involuntary commitment to psychiatric care instead of imprisonment, unless new information about his mental health emerges during the trial set to start in April.

As expected, they charged him under a paragraph in Norway’s anti-terror law that refers to violent acts intended to disrupt key government functions or spread fears in the population.

Breivik has confessed to the July 22 attacks but denies criminal guilt, portraying the victims as “traitors” for embracing immigration policies he claims will result in an Islamic colonization of Norway.

Complete Coverage: Massacre in Norway

The indictment listed the names of the eight people killed when a bomb exploded in downtown Oslo and the 69 victims of a shooting spree on Utoya island outside the capital, where the youth wing of the governing Labor Party was holding its annual summer camp.

Reading from the indictment, prosecutor Inga Bejer Engh said 34 of the victims at Utoya were between 14 and 17 years old, 22 were aged 18-20, six were between 21 and 25 and seven were older than 25.

She said 67 died of gunshot wounds, and two died of fall injuries or drowning.

The indictment also listed the names of 33 people wounded in the shooting and nine people who were seriously injured by the explosion in Oslo’s government district.

Police spokesman Tore Jo Nielsen told Norwegian broadcaster NRK outside Oslo’s Ila prison that Breivik had been “totally calm” when he was read the charges.

The terror charges carry a maximum penalty of 21 years in prison but prosecutors are working under the assumption that Breivik is legally insane and therefore unfit for prison. However, they said that this assessment could change during the trial.

“We’re keeping the possibility open that there could be things during the presentation of evidence that may change our view,” Bejer Engh said.

A second, court-ordered psychiatric evaluation of Breivik is ongoing after an initial review — which concluded he was a paranoid schizophrenic — met widespread criticism. Some experts questioned whether someone suffering from a grave mental illness would be capable of carrying out attacks requiring such meticulous preparation.

Breivik himself has rejected the diagnosis and his defense lawyer Geir Lippestad told Norway’s TV2 that his client was “disappointed” that it was included in the indictment.

Breivik also rejects the authority of the Norwegian legal system, calling it a tool of the left-leaning elites he claims have betrayed the country.

Investigators haven’t found any indications to support Breivik’s claims that he belongs to a secret anti-Muslim resistance movement plotting to overthrow European governments and replace them with “patriotic” regimes.

Tove Selbekk, a member of a support group for those affected by the massacre, welcomed the indictment but said many survivors and families of victims are dreading the start of the trial, set for April 16.

“We’re very clear on the fact that it will be tough … to hear him explain himself and to hear about all those who passed away and how they passed away,” said Selbekk, whose daughter survived the Utoya massacre. “But this is something we need to go through.”

SOURCE

MARCH 7, 1965: SELMA TO MONTGOMERY MARCH FOR VOTING RIGHTS

Dreams are illustrations from the book your soul is writing about you.

Marsha Norma

Today is the 47TH Anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery March for voting rights.

The Selma-to-Montgomery March for voting rights was a momentous event for the modern civil rights movement. On “Bloody Sunday,” March 7, 1965, under the direction of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 600 civil rights protestors started a peaceful voting rights march from Selma, Alabama. 

Marchers, Selma to Montgomery March for Voting Rights, 1965.
Photograph by Matt Herron.

Heading  east out of Selma on U.S. Route 80, they got only as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge six blocks away, where state troopers and local lawmen attacked them with billy clubs, shoved, beat, tear-gassed and cattle-prodded them, knocking many of the defenseless marchers down, riding horses over them, and forcing them back into Selma.

Selma Police arrest peaceful demonstrators.  Selma police arresting nonviolent marchers during their first attempt to march from Selma to Montgomery, March 7, 1965. The violence against marchers prompted President Johnson to submit a proposal for a strong Voting Rights Act. Source: Alabama Sovereignty Commission, Administrative files, SG13843, folder 8, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery Alabama.

Newsreel footage showed the carnage and brutality meted out to the marchers. The nation was outraged.

Two days later on March 9, Dr. King, led another march to the bridge—this time a “symbolic” march to the bridge.

Then civil rights leaders sought court protection for a third, full-scale march from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery.

Federal District Court Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr., ruled on the case and weighed the right of mobility against the right to march, ruling in favor of the marchers.

“The law is clear that the right to petition one’s government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups…,” said Judge Johnson, “and these rights may be exercised by marching, even along public highways.”

On Sunday, March 21, with 3,200 marchers strong, they set out again for Montgomery, walking 12 miles a day and sleeping in fields. By the time they reached the capitol of Montgomery, Alabama on Thursday, March 25, they were 25,000-strong.

Less than five months after the last of the three marches, President Lyndon Johnson finally signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In 1996, the Selma-to-Montgomery National Historic Trail was created by under the National Trails Systems Act of 1968.

Designated an “All American Road” by the Secretary of Transportation and an intra-agency panel of experts, the road is of national significance and is the highest tribute a road can receive under the Federal Highway Administration’s National Scenic Byways Program.

. . . .AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: “THE SNEETCHES”

I have been a big fan of Dr. Seuss ever since I was introduced to his wonderful writings when I was a child.

In honor of Theodore Seuss Geisel’s birthday (March 2, 1904 – September 24, 1991) , I have decided to post one of my favourite Dr. Seuss morality tales, and that is “The Sneetches”. The Sneetch story is similar to another allegorical tale I read as a child:  Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, by George Schuyler, published in 1931. A satire on American racial relations, it too told a tale of race as an obsession and a commodity to be profited from.

(I will do a review on Black No More. As a novel, it is not well-known and also is a morality tale that gives a message on the futility of racism and race obsession.)

Written and published in 1961, the Sneetch story centers around two groups of Sneetches—those with stars on their bellies, and those without.

The story addresses prejudice, inferior job/social/economic opportunities, class warfare, shyster huckesterism, fear and contempt of the unknown, the desire to be like those of the dominant status quo,  who have more and are privileged because of their class, race or gender. “You might think such a thing wouldn’t matter at all,” Dr. Seuss wrote. But there was no room for plain-bellied sneetches to play and have the best things, to have healthy, productive and rewarding lives. That was left to the “ones with stars upon thars.” The desire to be like those in power, and the attempt to do anything to be like those in power even if it means tearing yourself to pieces—physically and psychologically. Not to mention those who prey upon differences, exploiting various group’s fears and hatreds of each other, and as a result need no help in dividing and conquering groups who have differences, all the while making profits off of prejudices and intolerance.

Are you a star-bellied Sneetch, or, are you one of the Sneetches who “have no stars upon thars”?

In a nation that still is a long way from equality and fairness for all, here is the story of the Sneetches and how their response toward difference nearly destroyed them all.

In the end, the starred and starless Sneetches realize that their differences should not divide them and that whether a star was on their belly or not, it was pointless and destructive to concentrate on the outer image. Cooperation and building a better community for all became the real aim for:  “The Sneetches got really quite smart on that day. That day they decided that Sneetches are Sneetches And no kind of Sneetch is the best on the beaches. That day all the Sneetches forgot about stars and whether they had one, or not, upon thars.”

*****************************************************************************

The Sneetches, by Dr. Seuss (from The Sneetches and Other Stories, )

Now, the Star-Bell Sneetches had bellies with stars. The Plain-Belly Sneetches had none upon thars. Those stars weren’t so big. They were really so small. You might think such a thing wouldn’t matter at all.

But, because they had stars, all the Star-Belly Sneetches Would brag, “We’re the best kind of Sneetch on the beaches.” With their snoots in the air, they would sniff and they’d snort “We’ll have nothing to do with the Plain-Belly sort!” And, whenever they met some, when they were out walking, They’d hike right on past them without even talking.

When the Star-Belly children went out to play ball, Could a Plain Belly get in the game? Not at all. You only could play if your bellies had stars And the Plain-Belly children had none upon thars.

When the Star Belly Sneetches had frankfurter roasts Or picnics or parties or marshmallow toasts, They never invited the Plain-Belly Sneetches They left them out cold, in the dark of the beaches. They kept them away. Never let them come near. And that’s how they treated them year after year.

Then ONE day, it seems while the Plain-Belly Sneetches Were moping and doping alone on the beaches, Just sitting there wishing their bellies had stars, A stranger zipped up in the strangest of cars!

“My friends”, he announced in a voice clear and clean, “My name is Sylvester McMonkey McBean. And I’ve heard of Your troubles. I’ve heard you’re unhappy. But I can fix that, I’m the Fix-It-Up Chappie.

I’ve come here to help you. I have what you need. And my prices are low. And I work with great speed. And my work is one hundred per cent guaranteed!”

Then, quickly, Sylvester McMonkey McBean Put together a very peculiar machine. And he said, “You want stars like a Star-Belly Sneetch? My friends, you can have them for three dollars each!”

“Just pay me your money and hop right aboard!” So they clambered inside. Then the big machine roared. And it klonked. And it bonked. And it jerked. And it berked. And it bopped them about. But the thing really worked! When the Plain-Belly Sneetches popped out, they had stars! They actually did. They had stars upon thars!

Then they yelled at the ones who had stars at the start, “We’re still the best Sneetches and they are the worst. But now, how in the world will we know”, they all frowned, “If which kind is what, or the other way round?”

Then up came McBean with a very sly wink. And he said, “Things are not quite as bad as you think. So you don’t know who’s who. That is perfectly true. But come with me, friends. Do you know what I’ll do? I’ll make you, again, the best Sneetches on the beaches. And all it will cost you is ten dollars eaches.”

“Belly stars are no longer in style”, said McBean. “What you need is a trip through my Star-Off Machine. This wondrous contraption will take OFF your stars so you won’t look like Sneetches that have them on thars.” And that handy machine working very precisely Removed all the stars from their tummies quite nicely.

Then, with snoots in the air, they paraded about. And they opened their beaks and they let out a shout, “We know who is who! Now there Isn’t a doubt. The best kind of Sneetches are Sneetches without!”

Then, of course, those with stars got all frightfully mad. To be wearing a star was frightfully bad. Then, of course, old Sylvester McMonkey McBean invited THEM into his Star-Off Machine.

Then, of course from THEN on, as you probably guess, Things really got into a horrible mess.

All the rest of that day, on those wild screaming beaches, The Fix-It-Up Chappie kept fixing up Sneetches. Off again! On again! In again! Out again! Through the machines they raced round and about again,

Changing their stars every minute or two. They kept paying money. They kept running through until the Plain nor the Star-Bellies knew Whether this one was that one or that one was this one. Or which one Was what one or what one was who.

Then, when every last cent of their money was spent, The Fix-It-Up Chappie packed up. And he went. And he laughed as he drove In his car up the beach, “They never will learn. No. You can’t Teach a Sneetch!”

But McBean was quite wrong. I’m quite happy to say. That the Sneetches got really quite smart on that day. The day they decided that Sneetches are Sneetches.

And no kind of Sneetch is the best on the beaches. That day, all the Sneetches forgot about stars and whether They had one, or not, upon thars.

INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY: MARCH 8, 2012

INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY

Quick Facts

International Women’s Day celebrates women’s achievements worldwide and throughout history.

Local names

Name	Language
International Women’s Day	English
Día Internacional de la Mujer	Spanish

Alternative name

United Nations Day for Women’s Rights and International Peace

International Women’s Day 2012

Thursday, March 8, 2012

International Women’s Day 2013

Friday, March 8, 2013

International Women’s Day is annually held on March 8 to celebrate women’s achievements throughout history and across nations. It is also known as the United Nations (UN) Day for Women’s Rights and International Peace.

International Women’s Day celebrates women’s achievements worldwide. Illustration based on artwork from ©iStockphoto.com/Mark Kostich, Thomas Gordon, Anne Clark & Peeter Viisimaa

What do people do?

International Women’s Day events are held worldwide on March 8. Various women, including political, community, and business leaders, as well as leading educators, inventors, entrepreneurs, and television personalities, are usually invited to speak at various events on the day. Such events may include seminars, conferences, luncheons, dinners or breakfasts. The messages given at these events often focus on various themes such as innovation, the portrayal of women in the media, or the importance of education and career opportunities.

Many students in schools and other educational settings participate in special lessons, debates or presentations about the importance of women in society, their influence, and issues that affect them.  In some countries school children bring gifts to their female teachers and women receive small presents from friends or family members. Many workplaces make a special mention about International Women’s Day through internal newsletters or notices, or by handing out promotional material focusing on the day.

Public life

International Women’s Day, is a public holiday in some countries such as (but not exclusive to):

• Azerbaijan.
• Armenia.
• Belarus.
• Kazakhstan.
• Moldova
• Russia.
• Ukraine.

Many businesses, government offices, educational institutions are closed in the above-mentioned countries on this day, where it is sometimes called Women’s Day. International Women’s Day is a national observance in many other countries. Some cities may host various wide-scale events such as street marches, which may temporarily affect parking and traffic conditions.

Background

Much progress has been made to protect and promote women’s rights in recent times. However, nowhere in the world can women claim to have all the same rights and opportunities as men, according to the UN. The majority of the world’s 1.3 billion absolute poor are women. On average, women receive between 30 and 40 percent less pay than men earn for the same work. Women also continue to be victims of violence, with rape and domestic violence listed as significant causes of disability and death among women worldwide.

The first International Women’s Day occurred on March 19 in 1911. The inaugural event, which included rallies and organized meetings, was a big success in countries such as Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland. The March 19 date was chosen because it commemorated the day that the Prussian king promised to introduce votes for women in 1848. The promise gave hope for equality but it was a promise that he failed to keep.  The International Women’s Day date was moved to March 8 in 1913.

The UN drew global attention to women’s concerns in 1975 by calling for an International Women’s Year. It also convened the first conference on women in Mexico City that year. The UN General Assembly then invited member states to proclaim March 8 as the UN Day for Women’s Rights and International Peace in 1977. The day aimed to help nations worldwide eliminate discrimination against women. It also focused on helping women gain full and equal participation in global development.  International Men’s Day is also celebrated on November 19 each year.

Symbols

The International Women’s Day logo is in purple and white and features the symbol of Venus, which is also the symbol of being female.  The faces of women of all backgrounds, ages, and nations are also seen in various promotions, such as posters, postcards and information booklets, on International Women’s Day.  Various messages and slogans that promote the day are also publicized during this time of the year.

External links

International Women’s Day official site

International Women’s Day Observances

Weekday	Date	Year	Name	Holiday type	Where it is observed
Sat	Mar 8	1980	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Sun	Mar 8	1981	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Mon	Mar 8	1982	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Tue	Mar 8	1983	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Thu	Mar 8	1984	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Fri	Mar 8	1985	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Sat	Mar 8	1986	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Sun	Mar 8	1987	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Tue	Mar 8	1988	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Wed	Mar 8	1989	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Thu	Mar 8	1990	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Fri	Mar 8	1991	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Sun	Mar 8	1992	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Mon	Mar 8	1993	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Tue	Mar 8	1994	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Wed	Mar 8	1995	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Fri	Mar 8	1996	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Sat	Mar 8	1997	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Sun	Mar 8	1998	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Mon	Mar 8	1999	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Wed	Mar 8	2000	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Thu	Mar 8	2001	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Fri	Mar 8	2002	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Sat	Mar 8	2003	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Mon	Mar 8	2004	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Tue	Mar 8	2005	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Wed	Mar 8	2006	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Thu	Mar 8	2007	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Sat	Mar 8	2008	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Sun	Mar 8	2009	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Mon	Mar 8	2010	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Tue	Mar 8	2011	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Thu	Mar 8	2012	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Fri	Mar 8	2013	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Sat	Mar 8	2014	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance
Sun	Mar 8	2015	International Women’s Day	United Nations observance

. . . .AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: ‘ALWAYS TOMORROW”

Today may have been a rough day.

Today may have been a day where you thought you could not go on.

You wanted to turn inward and felt that you could count on no one to understand. You felt that no matter what happened to you today, that it would happen again, and again, and again, the next day……………

Today may have been a day where you lost faith in all those around you; where you felt that no one was in your corner; that no one cared.

Today may have been a day where you wanted to give up, give over, and give out.

You may have wanted to let go, or worse, to cut the rope.

But…………………

…………….something within you said to hold on. To stay strong. To remain steadfast. To have faith.

You are still alive. There is still a future for you and all those you cross paths with.

There is still yet hope. In your own way, you do make a difference in other people’s lives, in this world.

To not forget, that whatever happened today that you thought you could not overcome, that there is still always tomorrow.

Always.

Tomorrow.

Here is Gloria Estefan singing her beautiful song “Always Tomorrow” when she and her band appeared on the German talk show, “Gottschalk Late Night”, 1993, hosted by  Thomas Gottschalk. The song is from her album, Gloria Estefan Greatest Hits, released by Epic Records, October 30, 1992.

Always Tomorrow (lyrics Gloria Estefan)

I’ve been alone inside myself, far too long

Never really wanted it that way but I let it happen.

If I could do it all again, my life would be

Infinitely better than before, I wouldn’t waste a moment.

Make time for laughing with my friends

Make love, make music, make amends

Try to make a difference, try to love, try to understand

Instead of just givin’ up, I’d use the power at my command.

But there’s always tomorrow to start over again.

Things will never stay the same

The only one sure thing is change

That’s why there’s always tomorrow.

I guess it took a little time for me to see

The reason I was born into this world and what I’d have to go through.

Before I’d finally realized that I could be

Infinitely better than before, definitely stronger.

I’ll face whatever comes my way

Savor each moment of the day.

Love as many people as I can along the way.

Help someone who’s given up, if it’s just to raise my eyes and pray.

But there’s always tomorrow to start over again

Things will never stay the same.

The only one sure thing is change.

That’s why there’s always tomorrow.

Before your last setting sun.

And everything your heart has longed for

Has yet to be one.

Yes there’s always, always, always tomorrow

Though people come and they go.

But if you’ve brought some love to their lives

Then you’ve got somethin’ to show, oh.

There’s always, always, always tomorrow to start over again.

Things will never stay the same.

The only one sure thing is change.

That’s why there’s always, always, always

Always, always, always, always tomorrow.

IN REMEMBRANCE: 3-4-2012

STAN STEARNS, PHOTOGRAPHER WHO CAUGHT JFK, JR’S SALUTE ON FILM

Stan Stearns/Corbis

John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father’s casket on Nov. 25, 1963.

By MATT FLEGENHEIMER

Published: March 3, 2012

Stan Stearns, whose iconic photograph of John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father’s casket on Nov. 25, 1963, helped encapsulate a nation’s grief, died Friday at a hospice near Annapolis, Md. He was 76.

Joshua McKerrow/The Capital, via Associated Press

Stan Stearns with a detail from his iconic photograph of John F. Kennedy Jr. in 2007.

The cause was lung cancer, his son, Jay Stearns, said.

The story of the famous image, captured while Mr. Stearns was on assignment for United Press International, is known virtually frame by frame to family and friends. Mr. Stearns made sure of that, said Gary Haynes, 76, another U.P.I. photographer working on the day of the president’s funeral.

“I’ve heard several versions of it, which he tended to embellish at bars,” Mr. Haynes said.

Cordoned with a horde of photographers across from the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington that day, Mr. Stearns trained his lens on Jacqueline Kennedy as the coffin neared. She bent toward John Jr. It was his third birthday. She whispered something. And, suddenly, the boy raised his right arm.

“The hand went up. Click — one exposure,” Mr. Stearns told The Times in 2007. “That was it. That was the picture.”

Jay Stearns said his father’s experience covering Mrs. Kennedy allowed him to size up the scene in a way that peers could not.

“My father had an incredible ability to anticipate a moment,” Jay Stearns said in a phone interview. “That photograph was a culmination of him knowing her.”

Stanley Frank Stearns was born May 11, 1935, in Annapolis, Md., to William and Lillian Stearns, who owned a jewelry business. Mr. Stearns spent four years with the Air Force as a photographer for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, his son said, before joining U.P.I. in Washington near the end of the Eisenhower administration. He later covered the administrations of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon before moving into commercial photography in the 1970s.

Besides his son, Jay, other survivors include a brother, Allan, of Naples, Fla.

In 2007, Mr. Stearns’s signature shot became the center of a controversy after the death of the photographer Joe O’Donnell, whose claim that he had taken the famous picture was repeated in remembrances nationwide.

Mr. Stearns’s colleagues swarmed to set the record straight. In e-mails to former U.P.I. colleagues in 2007, Mr. Stearns offered his own detailed retelling.

After snapping the photograph, Mr. Stearns wrote, he ignored orders to go to Arlington National Cemetery and instead walked the film to the U.P.I bureau himself, convinced he had secured the day’s indelible image. A photo manager in the office was furious, his face turning red, then white, Mr. Stearns said. “You better have the picture of the funeral or you’re fired,” he recalled one boss yelling.

The photo manager paced outside the door as Mr. Stearns processed the film himself — a 17-minute task, he wrote. Finally, Mr. Stearns showed him the image.

“He does have the picture,” the man shouted.

SOURCE

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ANDREW BREITBART, CONSERVATIVE BLOGGER

By JEREMY W. PETERS

Published: March 1, 2012

Andrew Breitbart, a conservative blogger and activist who built a national media persona  by putting undercover video on the Internet to bring discredit and disgrace to his liberal targets, died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 43.

Andrew Burton/Getty Images

Andrew Breitbart employed videos and photos against his liberal targets.

Related

• A Conservative Blogger Looks for Legitimacy(June 7, 2011)

• The Right’s Blogger Provocateur(June 27, 2011)

Kathy Willens/Associated Press

Mr. Breitbart spoke during an interview at The Associated Press’ headquarters in June 2011.

The cause was apparently a heart attack, said his father-in-law, the actor Orson Bean. Someone saw Mr. Breitbart collapse on the sidewalk, Mr. Bean added, and when the paramedics arrived they were unable to revive him. Mr. Bean said he believed Mr. Breitbart had a history of heart problems.

Mr. Breitbart was as polarizing as he was popular. On the political right he was hailed in the same breath with Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge as a truth-teller who exposed bias and corruption. On the left, he was derided by many as a provocateur who played fast and loose with the facts to further his agenda.

Among his biggest coups was forcing the resignation of a New York congressman, Anthony D. Weiner. Someone in Mr. Breitbart’s network of tipsters and fans had e-mailed him sexually explicit photos that Mr. Weiner had taken of himself and sent to women online. Mr. Breitbart published some of the photos on his Web site, BigGovernment.com, igniting a firestorm that reached to the highest levels of Congress.

The move displayed two of Mr. Breitbart’s defining features as a media personality: an eagerness to flout authority, and an innate sense for the viral news story. With the Weiner scandal, Mr. Breitbart, already a cult figure, only solidified his status as a force in his own right.

On Thursday, many of the luminaries he looked up to as a young man paid homage to him. Mr. Limbaugh called him “an indefatigable bulldog for the conservative cause.”

Mr. Breitbart was one of the most aggressive — and controversial — users of blogs to disseminate political information and rumors, and his video methods were new in conservative media. What Mr. Limbaugh was to radio and what Mr. Drudge was to the Internet, Mr. Breitbart was to online video and images.

Mr. Breitbart worked with Mr. Drudge early in his career, helping him staff The Drudge Report. But another media star, Arianna Huffington, gave Mr. Breitbart what turned out to be his biggest break. She hired him in 1997 when she was a conservative commentator in need of research help. She gave Mr. Breitbart a title, director of research, and what he described in his book “Righteous Indignation” as a “bizarre and cloistered office” in her Los Angeles home.

It did not take long for Ms. Huffington to see his value as a tireless employee. He struck up a friendship with her and her mother, who came to regard him as almost a son of her own.

“She would say, ‘Andrew, you’ve got to sleep, got to stop,’ ” Ms. Huffington said in an interview on Thursday. “You could sort of see the destructive side of his incredible passion for whatever he believed in at the time. It was all-consuming.”

Mr. Breitbart was instrumental in helping Ms. Huffington create an early Web presence with a site called Arianna Online. After he left her for The Drudge Report, she reached out to him again. He wrote in his book that he got a call one day in 2004. It was Ms. Huffington. “Do you have any ideas for a Web site?” he quoted her as asking. Mr. Breitbart went on to work with Ms. Huffington and her business partners Kenneth Lerer and Jonah Peretti for the next seven months creating the now heavily trafficked news site The Huffington Post.

Andrew James Breitbart was born on Feb. 1, 1969, in Los Angeles, a month before Gerry and Arlene Breitbart adopted him. He grew up in the exclusive Brentwood section of Los Angeles, an experience he called disjointing.

“Even though it was very much a keep-up-with-the-Joneses enclave, my parents seemed oblivious to all that,” he wrote. “When the first sushi restaurant popped up in our neighborhood in the early 1980s, we had meat loaf that night.”

He was a graduate of Tulane University, having majored in American studies.

Though he described his parents as Republican, he said they were not overtly political. “They came from the Silent Generation,” he said.

Silent Mr. Breitbart was not. As a conservative commentator he was a frequent presence on cable television shoutfests. He seemed to thrive on conflict.

In 2009, Mr. Breitbart started the first in a series of “Big” blogs with names like “Big Journalism,” “Big Hollywood” and “Big Government.” The Web sites gave Mr. Breitbart a big online perch of his own from which to unleash his assaults on liberal causes and figures.

One target, in 2009, was the community organizing group Acorn. A young conservative activist named James O’Keefe had come to Mr. Breitbart with undercover video of Acorn workers apparently offering advice on how to evade taxes and conceal child prostitution. In videotaping the encounter, Mr. O’Keefe and a companion had posed as a pimp and a prostitute. Mr. Breitbart eagerly published the tapes, and they went viral. In response, Congress ended grants to Acorn, and federal agencies severed ties with the group.

Mr. Breitbart earned a reputation for being playful but also selective with the facts. In an infamous case in 2010, he helped instigate the firing of an Agriculture Department official, Shirley Sherrod, by publishing a heavily edited video clip of her speaking at an N.A.A.C.P. event. Her comments, as edited, suggested that she had discriminated against a white farmer more than two decades ago.

In the full video, however, she could be heard saying that she had eventually helped the farmer and that she had learned from the experience — that all people must overcome their prejudices. At Mr. Breitbart’s death, she was suing him for defamation.

Many on the left, like the liberal Web site Media Matters, often portrayed Mr. Breitbart as a caricature. Indeed, there was an element of performance art to what Mr. Breitbart did that could make him seem coarse and crude. He was often profane, and it was not uncommon to find him in rumpled shirts and torn jeans.

But in reality he was a more complex figure. He supported gay rights and once served on the board of GOProud, an organization for conservatives dedicated to gay and lesbian causes. His friends described him as a deeply committed father to his four children and a loyal husband to his wife, Susie.

And while he often railed against what he called corrupt mainstream media, he also knew that he needed them to further his own legitimacy. When he released the Weiner photos, he partnered with ABC News because, he said, he knew it would lend an imprimatur of authority.

He is survived by his wife; a daughter, Mia; and three sons, Samson, Charlie and William Buckley.

He was true to his reputation right up until he died. At 11:25 p.m. on Wednesday he sent out a Twitter message to someone who had taken issue with one of his comments. Mr. Breitbart had referred to him using a vulgarity “cause I thought you were being intentionally disingenuous,” he wrote. “If not I apologize.”

Ian Lovett, Brian Stelter and Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

SOURCE

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JOE THOMPSON, WHO HELPED PRESERVE THE BLACK STRING BAND

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: March 1, 2012

“I got the name of being a pretty good fiddle player,” Joe Thompson once said. “I even been to Carnegie Hall playing fiddle.”

Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos

Joe Thompson, a fiddle player, is credited with preserving the black string band.

He also played at the Kennedy Center in Washington and at folk festivals from coast to coast, including one at the Smithsonian. The National Endowment for the Arts awarded him a National Heritage Fellowship. And he is credited with helping to keep alive an African-American musical tradition — the black string band — that predates the blues and influenced country music and bluegrass.

Yet until 1973, when he was in his mid 50s, not many people outside North Carolina had ever heard him play.

Mr. Thompson always said death would come when “the good Lord sends the morning train,” and the train arrived on Feb. 20. He died at 93 in a nursing home in Burlington, N.C., said Larry Vellani, a musician and a friend of Mr. Thompson’s.

He was born not far from there, in north-central North Carolina, and one of his earliest memories was of squirming on the floor as his father played the fiddle, according to an account given to the North Carolina Folk Heritage Award Program. His father had learned the instrument from his own father, a slave, and taught him in turn. Joe Thompson made the strings for his first fiddle from screen-door wires, and by the time he was 7, he was playing a real fiddle at dances while propped on a wooden chair, his feet not yet reaching the floor.

Later on he and his brother Nate and a first cousin, Odell Thompson, formed a string band, with Nate and Odell on banjos, and well into their teens they played their music — something like square dance music, only more rhythmic — all over North Carolina.

“People loved to see us come,” Mr. Thompson said in an interview with American Legacy magazine in 2008. “Every year we would shuck corn and strip tobacco, then hoop it up with a big dance.”

Then came World War II, and Mr. Thompson, entered the Army, serving in a segregated unit in Europe driving a bulldozer. After the war, fiddling became less and less a part of his life. By the postwar years, black string bands were, at most, a local hobby. Mr. Thompson bought a four-room house on an unpaved country road and began a 38-year stint working in a furniture factory.

That was where he was in 1973, Mr. Vellani said, running a rip saw, when Kip Lornell, then a graduate student in ethnomusicology, decided to check out rumors that some masters of the old-time string-band music were still around. Stopping by Mr. Thompson’s house, he heard him and his cousin play — his brother had moved to Philadelphia by then — and urged them to look into performing at folk music festivals that were springing up.

They did, and soon they were invited to perform across the country, from Massachusetts to Washington State. They played in Australia. In 1989, they recorded “Old-Time Music from the North Carolina Piedmont” for the Global Village label. The musical folklorist Alan Lomax included the three Thompsons in his American Patchwork documentary film series. And in 1990 Joe and Odell Thompson were onstage at Carnegie Hall as part of its Folk Masters program.

Mr. Thompson was in fine fettle. “Holding his bow about five inches from the end, Joe Thompson draws a scratchy, rakish tone from his fiddle, full of higher overtones,” Jon Pareles wrote of the performance in The New York Times. “He breaks melodies into short phrases and often adds double-stops that suggest modal harmonies.”

After Odell Thompson died in car accident in 1994, Joe almost quit. But he went on to record a solo album, “Family Tradition,” on the Rounder label in 1999. He received the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 2007 and performed that year at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.

String-band music, which combines fiddle, banjo and sometimes other instruments, owes much to African-American traditions. Banjos originally came from Africa, and though violins are European in origin, slaves were taught to play them for their masters as early as the 17th century. Paul F. Wells a former president of the Society for American Music, wrote in the Black Music Research Journal that slaves were most likely the earliest musicians to combine violin and banjo.

In the 19th century, both whites and blacks — sometimes separately, sometimes together, as in Mr. Thompson’s Piedmont region — created the exuberant music that both black and white string bands played, the white bands at square dances and the black bands at their own dances, called “frolics.”

But there were differences. Black fiddlers played in a style that was more rhythmic, syncopated and African in character, and called the tunes “Negro jigs.” As music became more commonly recorded in the 1920s, the black string-band tradition receded. Black music was veering toward the blues, while white string bands were categorized as “hillbilly,” playing music that is acknowledged to be the precursor of today’s bluegrass and country music. The influence of black string bands on white country musicians slipped from memory.

As if this slight wasn’t enough, Mr. Thompson complained in a 2004 interview with a North Carolina newspaper that when Elvis Presley started singing the blues, “people thought that was white people’s music, too.”

“That messes black people up,” he said.

Joseph Aquilla Thompson was born on Dec. 9, 1918, on a farm near Mebane, N.C., where he lived most of his life. Mr. Vellani said in an interview that a stroke Mr. Thompson had in 2001 had hurt his fiddling but not his strong singing voice.

Mr. Thompson’s first wife, the former Hallie Evans, died in 1987. He is survived by his wife, the former Pauline McAdoo Mebane; his sons Arthur James Snead and Hassel McCoy Evans; four stepchildren; eight grandchildren; 14 great-grandchildren and five great-great-grandchildren.

The Thompsons may have been the last black string band still active, said Wayne Martin, folklife director for the North Carolina Arts Council. But Mr. Thompson planted a seed for the future. In 2005, three young musicians started coming to his house every Thursday to learn the old ways. They formed a band, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, “mostly as a tribute to Joe,” they said. Their 2010 album, “Genuine Negro Jig,” won a Grammy for best traditional folk album.

“He lived long enough for people to get what it was he had to share,” Mr. Vellani said.

SOURCE

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DAVY JONES, A SINGER IN THE MONKEES

via Reuters

The Monkees in their heyday: from left, Michael Nesmith, Peter Tork, Davy Jones. Not pictured, to the far right, is Micky Dolenz. Mr. Jones died on Wednesday at age 66.

By MARGALIT FOX

Published: February 29, 2012

Davy Jones, by long-held public consensus the handsomest and most popular of the Monkees, the collectively young, longhaired, wildly famous and preternaturally buoyant pop group of the 1960s and afterward, died on Wednesday in Indiantown, Fla. He was 66.

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• City Room: Davy Jones’s New York(March 1, 2012)

Mike Gray/European Pressphoto Agency

Davy Jones of the Monkees performed live at the Manchester Apollo last May.

The apparent cause was a heart attack, his publicist, Helen Kensick, said.

Created in 1966, the Monkees comprised Mr. Jones, Micky Dolenz, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork. The group sold millions of records. Its recording of “Daydream Believer,” by John Stewart, became a No. 1 single, as did its recording of “Last Train to Clarksville,” by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, and its cover of Neil Diamond’s “I’m a Believer.”

Though the Monkees officially lasted only until the early ’70s, they reconvened sporadically for decades. For much of that time Mr. Jones also toured as a solo singer-songwriter; among his last performances was one on Feb. 18 at B. B. King Blues Club & Grill in Manhattan.

For all the Monkees’ chart-topping acclaim, the group never pretended to be anything other than what it was: a smoke-and-mirrors incarnation of a pop group reminiscent of that mop-topped one from Liverpool, created for a benignly psychedelic American TV sitcom.

Broadcast on NBC, “The Monkees” lasted just two seasons, from September 1966 to March 1968, and featured Messrs. Jones, Dolenz, Nesmith and Tork as members of a freewheeling, fun-loving, beach-house-dwelling, up-and-coming pop group. The show won two Emmys in 1967: for outstanding comedy series and, to the director James Frawley, for outstanding directorial achievement in comedy.

To this day, its theme song is hard-wired into the baby-boomer brain:

Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees,

and people say we monkey around.

But we’re too busy singing

to put anybody down.

While the four did much of their own singing, they were relatively unbusy playing. Though each played an instrument — growing more proficient with time — most of the instrumentals on their albums were supplied by studio musicians. (On one album, “Headquarters,” released in 1967, the Monkees played their instruments themselves.)

The group’s critical reception was not unsurpassed. In 1967, in an article about one of the Monkees’ relatively rare live concerts of the period, at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, The New York Times said:

“Frequently during the performance, sound that resembled the lowing of a sick cow hovered over the stadium. This turned out to be one of those horns often heard at Shea Stadium during baseball games. It didn’t seem to hurt the musical evening.”

But the critics could not dim the profuse enthusiasm of fans, who were overwhelmingly young, female and shrieking — tweeners before the word was applied to that demographic.

This adulation (and in later years nostalgia) kept the Monkees going, in various incarnations, on and off for decades. Last year three-quarters of the group, absent Mr. Nesmith, briefly toured Britain and the United States before cutting the tour short because of unspecified internal dissension.

The group’s frontman and the only actual Englishman of the four, Mr. Jones was inclined to elicit the loudest shrieks of all. An index of his appeal was his guest appearance on a memorable episode of “The Brady Bunch” from 1971 entitled “Getting Davy Jones.” In it, Mr. Jones, playing himself, saves Marcia, the family’s eldest daughter, from social ruin by attending her prom.

Television and the stage were actually Mr. Jones’s original vocations.

David Thomas Jones was born on Dec. 30, 1945, in Manchester, England. A child actor, he appeared on “Coronation Street,” the British soap opera that went on the air in 1960 and is still running, and in the police drama “Z Cars.” After his mother’s death when he was a teenager, he abandoned acting. Slight of build — he stood not much more than 5 feet tall in his prime — he began to train as a jockey.

Lured back into the theater a few years later, he played the Artful Dodger in the West End musical “Oliver!” When the production moved to Broadway in 1963, he reprised the role (billed as David Jones), earning a Tony nomination as best featured actor in a musical.

Appearing with the cast of “Oliver!” on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” Mr. Jones had a transformative moment. After the cast sang, he heard wild cheering. But alas it was not for them: it was for the Beatles, also booked on the show that day.

“I thought: Is that what happens when you’re a pop singer?” Mr. Jones told The Palm Beach Post in 2004. “I want to be part of that!”

His work on Broadway led to guest roles on a few mid-’60s television shows, including “Ben Casey” and “The Farmer’s Daughter.” He was signed to a contract with Columbia Pictures/Screen Gems Television, which produced “The Monkees.”

Mr. Jones, who had homes in Hollywood, Fla., and Beavertown, Pa., spent his later years touring; acting occasionally on television shows like “My Two Dads” and “Boy Meets World”; raising horses; and recording, including the well-received solo album “Just Me” (2001), which featured his original songs.

Whatever Monkeedom still attached to him (and it was considerable) did not dismay him.

“People ask me if I ever get sick of playing ‘Daydream Believer’ or whatever,” he told The Chicago Daily Herald, a suburban newspaper, in 2006. “But I don’t look at it that way. Do they ask if Tony Bennett is tired of ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco’?”

Mr. Jones’s first marriage, to Linda Haines, ended in divorce, as did his second, to Anita Pollinger. His survivors include his third wife, Jessica Pacheco; two daughters from his first marriage, Talia Jones and Sarah McFadden; two daughters from his second marriage, Jessica Cramar and Annabel Jones; three sisters, Hazel Wilkinson, Lynda Moore and Beryl Leigh; and three grandchildren.

The other three members of the Monkees also survive.

Perhaps Mr. Jones’s most enduring legacy takes the form of a name. The name belongs to another English musician, who burst on the scene some years after the Monkees. This man, too, had been born David Jones. But thanks to the Monkees’ renown, he knew he would have to adopt another name entirely if he was to have the hope of a career.

So he called himself David Bowie.

Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

SOURCE

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