Citizen scientists are exploring exoplanets’ birthplaces, classifying more than 1 million infrared sources and finding 37 disk candidates (so far) for follow-up study.
The Esquel meteorite is a fine example of a pallasite, a meteorite that consists of gem-quality olivine embedded within an iron-nickel matrix. Natural History Museum, London.
Research shows that the magnetic fields in the asteroid parent bodies of two meteorites lasted hundreds of millions of years after our solar system’s formation.
Once the Rosetta spacecraft arrived at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko last August, European scientists used an array of instruments to assess every nook and cranny of the remarkable two-lobed nucleus.
A waxing gibbous Moon climbs above Orion in the weekend evenings, and Jupiter approaches opposition (February 6th). Expect beautiful views of Jupiter at its biggest throughout February.
Mona Lisa, or, La Gioconda, by Leonardo da Vinci. Painted between 1503 and 1517, oil on poplar wood panel, 76.8 × 53 cm (30.2 × 20.9 in). Collection of the Musée du Louvre, Paris, France.
Nestled in the rolling hills of the Ozark Mountains, Harrison, Ark., has a refurbished old-time town square and a steadily growing community college. Yet, like scores of small cities and towns across the country, the town could always use more tourist dollars and new businesses.
What the largely white city of 13,000 residents does not need is another racially provocative billboard, churning up its ghosts and scaring away potential industry and employees. But that is exactly what Harrison got Tuesday when the neo-Confederate Alabama-based League of the South (LOS) unveiled its latest billboard, once again plastered with the group’s one-word silent scream, “#Secede.”
The League, which advocates for a second secession—like the first went so well—and a society dominated by “European Americans,” has previously placed billboards in Florida, Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama. But this is apparently its first foray into Harrison, the site since 2013 of a war of words and billboards that has pitted white nationalists against the city and the Harrison Community Task Force on Race Relations.
Recently, a group of local high school students joined the fray, launching a Twitter and YouTube campaign promoting diversity and tolerance in their hometown. The student led effort is called #IAHARRISON.
“Once again Harrison is on the front lines to be victimized, criticized and condemned,” Layne Ragsdale, a Task Force member told Hatewatch. “Yet, now it seems that our most effective defense may be a group of teenagers using social media to tell their positive stories. That says much more about our community than a mere billboard.”
The Harrison billboard war began in Oct. 2013 when the first racially charged sign went up, proclaiming in big black letters the white nationalist mantra, “Anti-Racist is a Code Word for Anti-White.”
But no one claimed responsibility for leasing the space and there was nothing on the billboard to indicate who was behind it.
The Task Force countered with two billboards of its own that read, “Love your neighbor.” Below that ancient plea was a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
The owner of the billboard company, Claude West, refused to reveal the identity of the customer or take down the sign despite what he said was intense pressure from the city, “the Task Force, the alternative life-style people, gays, whatever at the college.”
“I went through hell,” West told Hatewatch. “My life was threatened. I came to the conclusion that I would stand up for the First Amendment. This was a life changing experience.”
As it happens, the League’s “Secede” billboard is located a few yards from the front door of West’s sign company. He said he is in the billboard business and as long as the sign “isn’t obscene” he is willing to lease the space. The lease is for no less than a year. “I don’t discriminate,” he said.
West said a couple of men came into his shop a few weeks ago and said they belonged to a “Christian group” that wanted to rent the billboard. “They want to get someone’s attention,” he said. “I don’t think people are real happy with the way the country is going.”
West also said that after his experience with the first anonymous billboard, he now requires every sign to include identification of the person or group responsible for it. In December, a Ku Klux Klan faction about 15 miles outside of Harrison included a link to its website when it openly leased space on one of West’s billboard’s in the city. The sign read, “It’s Not Racist to [Heart] your People.” And the League has included its name and a telephone number on its Harrison “Secede” sign.
“When I first saw it, I thought, ‘Here we go again,’” said Nate Jordon, a member of the Task Force, who is writing a history of Harrison. “It doesn’t surprise me that they chose Harrison. It seems Harrison has become a focal point for hate groups.”
Jordon said he also was not surprised that the “Secede” sign went up soon after the high school students began their social media pro-diversity campaign.
“They are posting videos and tweets to voice their opinion as young people, as a community, we are not racist, we do not stand with these racist hate groups,” Jordon said. “A lot of people are supporting them, but there has been a backlash from the hate groups. They have attacked their Twitter page. They have denigrated the high school students, speaking as they usually do in hyperbole and lies. The kids have really ruffled the feathers of the hate mongers in the area.”
The #IAMHARRISON YouTube videos are simple, short and sometimes powerful. “I am Josh,” it says on a piece of typing paper, held in front of the camera by a thin teenager with glasses. “Harrison is my home.
“I believe in diversity,” it says on another piece of paper Josh holds before replacing it with “#I Am Harrison.”
A teenager named Jesus holds up several signs that say he enjoys “music, cars and various cultures.” “#Encourage Diversity,” his last sign says.
Mariah lets her signs do the talking. “This town is small and close-knit, but we are not all white and we are not racist. Please know us before you label us.
On January 27 each year, the United Nations (UN) remembers the Holocaust that affected many people of Jewish origin during World War II. This day is called the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.The day also commemorates when the Soviet troops liberated the Nazi concentration and death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland on January 27, 1945. It is hoped that through remembering these events, people will remember the Holocaust and prevent genocide.
Holocaust survivors and various leaders make their voices heard on the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. Many of them speak publicly about the Holocaust or their experiences around the event, its aftermath and why the world should never forget what happened in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Many statements emphasize the need for future generations to learn about and remember the Holocaust and for everyone to work towards preventing genocide.
The UN organizes and supports events such as: concerts by musicians who survived the Holocaust or are survivors’ descendants; art exhibitions influenced by the Holocaust; presentations of special stamps; the introduction of special educational programs; and film screening and book signing focused on the Holocaust.
Israel and many countries in Europe and North America mark the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. Many academics present discussion papers or hold seminars or round table discussions on the Holocaust and its legacy in the modern world. Schools or colleges may also have special lessons on the Holocaust. The Holocaust and how people commemorate it receive special attention on the Internet, television, radio, print media.
Public life
The International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust is a global observance and not a public holiday.
Background
The Holocaust, or Shoah (Sho’ah, Shoa), is the term used to describe the deliberate murder and desecration of millions of people prior to and during World War II in Germany and German occupied areas in Europe. Many of them were Jewish but the Roma people, Soviet civilians and prisoners of war, ethnic Poles, people with disabilities, homosexuals and political and religious opponents were also killed. Many people died in concentration and death camps spread across Nazi-occupied Europe. One of the most notorious camps was Auschwitz-Birkenau, near Oświęcim, Poland. More than one million people died in Auschwitz-Birkenau before Soviet troops liberated it on January 27, 1945.
On January 24, 2005, the UN General Assembly commemorated the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. Following this session, a UN resolution was drafted to designate January 27 as the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. The resolution called for education programs on the Holocaust to help prevent genocide. It also rejected denials that the Holocaust occurred. On November 1, 2005, the assembly adopted this resolution so the day could be observed each year. It was first observed on January 27, 2006.
Many Jewish groups, particularly in Israel, also observe Yom HaShoah, which is a day of mourning for Holocaust victims on 27th day of the Hebrew month of Nisan, which falls in April or May of the Gregorian calendar.
Symbols
The symbol of the “Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme” consists of four elements on a solid black background. Two elements are the words “Remembrance and Beyond” and the UN symbol, both depicted in white. The UN symbol consists of a projection of the globe centered on the North Pole surrounded by two olive branches.
The other two elements are a piece of barbed wire and two white roses. The strands of the barbed wire merge into the stems of the roses. The barbed wire represents: the concentration camps; the loss of freedom of Jewish people and many other groups before and during World War II; and their pain and suffering.
The white roses represent peace, freedom and remembrance. These flowers also remind people of the White Rose, a non-violent resistance movement that was active in Germany from June 1942 until February 1943. In the United States and United Kingdom, white roses symbolize the investigation, remembrance and prevention of genocide.
International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust Observances
Weekday
Date
Year
Name
Holiday type
Where it is observed
Thu
Jan 27
2000
International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust
United Nations observance
Sat
Jan 27
2001
International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust
United Nations observance
Sun
Jan 27
2002
International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust
United Nations observance
Mon
Jan 27
2003
International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust
United Nations observance
Tue
Jan 27
2004
International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust
United Nations observance
Thu
Jan 27
2005
International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust
United Nations observance
Fri
Jan 27
2006
International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust
United Nations observance
Sat
Jan 27
2007
International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust
United Nations observance
Sun
Jan 27
2008
International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust
United Nations observance
Tue
Jan 27
2009
International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust
United Nations observance
Wed
Jan 27
2010
International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust
United Nations observance
Thu
Jan 27
2011
International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust
United Nations observance
Fri
Jan 27
2012
International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust
United Nations observance
Sun
Jan 27
2013
International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust
United Nations observance
Mon
Jan 27
2014
International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust
United Nations observance
Tue
Jan 27
2015
International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust
United Nations observance
Wed
Jan 27
2016
International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust
United Nations observance
Fri
Jan 27
2017
International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust
United Nations observance
Sat
Jan 27
2018
International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust
United Nations observance
Sun
Jan 27
2019
International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust
United Nations observance
Mon
Jan 27
2020
International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust
Ernie Banks, the greatest power-hitting shortstop of the 20th century and an unconquerable optimist whose sunny disposition never dimmed in 19 seasons with the perennially stumbling Chicago Cubs, died Friday in Chicago. He was 83.
His death, at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, was announced by Major League Baseball and the Cubs, who did not give a cause. Banks’s fellow Hall of Famer and longtime teammate Billy Williams told MLB.com that Banks had fallen about a month and half ago, but said he did not have further details.
President Obama and his wife, Michelle, called Banks “an incredible ambassador for baseball, and for the city of Chicago” in a joint statement.
“It’s a beautiful day, let’s play two” became the mantra of the man known as Mr. Cub, a fixture in what he called the friendly confines of Wrigley Field. The most popular Cub ever in a franchise dating to the 1870s, Banks became as much an institution in Chicago as the first Mayor Daley, Studs Terkel, Michael Jordan and George Halas.
Banks cut a slender figure at the plate in his right-handed stance, at 6 feet 1 and 180 pounds, but he whipped a light bat with powerful wrists, hitting 512 home runs. He was named the most valuable player in the National League in 1958 and 1959, the first to win the award in consecutive years, although the Cubs finished tied for fifth place each time. He was an All-Star in 11 seasons and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1977, his first year of eligibility.
Banks became the Cubs’ first black player on Sept. 17, 1953, six years after Jackie Robinson broke the modern major league color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Like Robinson, he had played for the Kansas City Monarchs, one of the Negro leagues’ best-known ball clubs, and when he joined the Cubs, many major league teams were still all white. He was among the first black stars of the modern game, along with Robinson, Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe of the Dodgers, Larry Doby with the Cleveland Indians, Hank Aaron with the Milwaukee Braves and Monte Irvin and then Willie Mays with the New York Giants.
Banks received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, from Obama in 2013. “I handed the president a bat that belonged to Jackie Robinson,” he told Sports Illustrated the next year. “The president held the bat in his hands — that was a thrill.”
Apart from Banks’s slugging feats, Obama hailed his “cheer and his optimism and his eternal faith that someday the Cubs would go all the way.”
“And that’s serious belief,” Obama added, to laughter. “That is something that even a White Sox fan like me can respect.”
Long after retiring, Banks recalled the sweltering midsummer’s day in 1969 when he bubbled over in a phrase that became his trademark.
“We were in first place, and all the reporters were already in the locker room when I arrived at Wrigley for a game with the Cardinals,” Banks told The Arizona Daily Star. “I walked in and said: ‘Boy, it’s a beautiful day. Let’s play two.’ They all thought I was crazy.”
Banks was the ninth player in major league history to hit 500 home runs, and when he retired after the 1971 season, his 293 home runs as a shortstop and his 47 homers in 1958 were career and single-season records for that position, marks eclipsed by Alex Rodriguez. He appeared in 2,528 games for the Cubs, a record for regular-season appearances by a player who never reached the postseason, playing at shortstop until the early 1960s, when he switched to first base because of leg problems.
Each spring, Banks predicted a pennant for the Cubs, who had not won a World Series since 1908 or a National League title since 1945. But each October he was back at home, most painfully in 1969, the year the Cubs experienced one of baseball’s most memorable collapses when they were overtaken by the Miracle Mets. Through all the losing seasons, he exuded an unbridled joy.
“Ernie was the eternal optimist,” the former Cubs second baseman Glenn Beckert told Peter Golenbock in “Wrigleyville” (1996). “Everything is fine, a great day. You’d go back to Chicago from the nice weather in Arizona. A lot of times we’d open against St. Louis, and when you did that, Bob Gibson was going to be their pitcher. Gray, overcast, 32 degrees in Wrigley, big crowd, start snowing about the sixth inning, and Ernie says: ‘Isn’t this a great day? We’ll keep nice and cool so we don’t get overheated.’ ”
Williams told MLB.com upon Banks’s death: “He always told Bob Gibson, ‘This guy is going to hit a home run off you today.’ We’d say, ‘Leave Bob Gibson alone.’ ”
Williams said that when he was asked whether Banks was always like that, “I’d say, ‘From the minute he woke up to the minute he went to bed, he’s the same way with a positive attitude and a joy to be around.’ ”
Ernest Banks was born in Dallas on Jan. 31, 1931, one of 12 children of Eddie and Essie Banks. His father, a former semipro player in black leagues in Texas, picked cotton and worked as a janitor in a grocery chain. His mother wanted him to become a minister, like one of his grandfathers.
Banks played softball (there was no baseball team) at Booker T. Washington High School in Dallas as well as football, and he competed in track and field. During his high school summers, he toured with a black semipro baseball team, the Colts, based in Amarillo, Tex.
After graduating from high school in 1950, Banks played one season for the Monarchs, then spent two years in the Army, returned to the Monarchs, and was sold to the Cubs in September 1953 for $10,000.
Another black player, Gene Baker, a slick-fielding shortstop, was called up by the Cubs at the same time after spending four seasons with their Los Angeles team in the Pacific Coast League. Banks became the first black player in a Cubs lineup because Baker was injured.
In his major league debut, Banks was 0 for 3 with an error against the Phillies in a 16-4 loss. But three days later, he hit his first major league homer, at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis, off the Cardinals’ Gerry Staley.
Banks became the Cubs’ regular shortstop in 1954, with Baker installed at second base. He hit 19 home runs that season, then emerged as a star in 1955.
Banks had been using a 34-ounce bat, but toward the end of the 1954 season he switched to a 31-ounce model. That helped him handle outside pitches and enabled him to whip the bat, taking advantage of his strong wrists, which he had developed playing handball.
“Everybody believed you had to have a big piece of lumber and then muscle the ball over the fence,” Banks told The Austin American-Statesman in 1994. “But by the time I, and Hank Aaron, another guy who did it with his wrists, were through, there were a lot of guys ordering light bats and playing handball.”
At a time of civil rights struggles in America, Banks ventured few thoughts beyond the baseball world. In his autobiography, “Mr. Cub,” written with Jim Enright (1971), he commented on the perception that as a celebrity, he should have spoken out.
“Some people feel that because you are black you will never be treated fairly, and that you should voice your opinions, be militant about them,” he wrote. “I don’t feel this way. You can’t convince a fool against his will.”
He added, “I don’t think it’s up to black athletes to get involved in political or racial issues.”
Banks set a major league record for grand slam home runs in a season when he hit five in 1955, and he hit more than 40 home runs five times. He led the National League in home runs and in runs batted in twice. He had 2,583 hits, drove in 1,636 runs and had a career batting average of .274.
He set single-season records for fewest errors (12) and best fielding average by a shortstop (.985) in 1959 and he won a Gold Glove award in 1960, his last full season at shortstop.
Banks was a player-coach in the late 1960s with the Cubs, and after his playing career ended, he spent two years as a full-time coach for the team. He later did part-time promotional work for the Cubs. When the team dropped him from that role in June 1983, saying he had missed some scheduled appearances, there was consternation in the Chicago press. “Cubs Snub Mr. Cub,” one headline read.
But the Cubs had Banks back as an honorary member of their 1984 divisional champions when they played the San Diego Padres in the league championship series — and lost.
Banks also served as a corporate spokesman and founded the Ernie Banks Live Above and Beyond Foundation, which raised money for charities.
He was the first player to have his jersey number retired by the Cubs, and his No. 14 flies from the left-field foul pole at Wrigley Field on game days. A statue depicting Banks in his batting stance was unveiled outside the ballpark in 2008. “Let’s Play Two” is inscribed on its base.
Banks was married four times. He and his fourth wife, Liz, who is among his survivors, adopted a newborn girl, Alyna, when he was 77; he had twin sons, Joey and Jerry, and a daughter, Jan, with his second wife, Eloyce. His first three marriages ended in divorce. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.
When Banks was elected to the Hall of Fame in January 1977, he talked about his outlook on life:
“I guess my critics say: He must be crazy. Nothing can be that beautiful. But when you think that there are so many people around the world who have nothing, you realize how lucky you are to be making a living in the big leagues. There’s an unbelievable, indescribable love for baseball in Wrigley Field.”
KING ABDULLAH, A SHREWD FORCE WHO SHAPED SAUDI ARABIA
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in 2007.Credit Dylan Martinez/Reuters
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who came to the throne in old age and earned a reputation as a cautious reformer even as the Arab Spring revolts toppled heads of state and Islamic State militants threatened the Muslim establishment that he represented, died on Friday, according to a statement on state television. He was 90.
The king’s death adds yet another element of uncertainty in a region already overwhelmed by crises and as Saudi Arabia is itself in a struggle with Iran for regional dominance.
The royal family moved quickly to assure a smooth transition of power in a nation that is a close ally of the United States, the world’s largest exporter of oil and the religious center of the Islamic faith. In a televised statement, a brother of Abdullah, Crown Prince Salman, announced that the king had died and that he had assumed the throne.
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Abdullah, left, with Crown Prince Salman, right, in 2010. Salman announced Friday that he had assumed the throne.Credit Saudi Press Agency, via Associated Press
Salman’s ascension appears to signal that the kingdom will preserve its current policies, but he faces exceptional new challenges. Though Saudi Arabia has traditionally preferred to push its agenda through checkbook diplomacy, it has taken a far more muscular approach since the Arab Spring, offering generous support to its allies, like Egypt, while working to oppose adversaries like President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Even as the drop in the price of oil has depleted its own treasury, it has steadfastly refused to cut the supply, hoping to increase market share at the expense of adversaries that are less able to pump oil at low prices.
“As our countries worked together to confront many challenges, I always valued King Abdullah’s perspective and appreciated our genuine and warm friendship,” President Obama said in a statement issued by the White House. “As a leader, he was always candid and had the courage of his convictions.”
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced that he was to lead the American delegation “to pay our respects and offer condolences.”
Accidents of birth and geology made Abdullah one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men. In control of a fifth of the world’s known petroleum reserves, he traveled to medical appointments abroad in a fleet of jumbo jets, and the changes he wrought in Saudi society were fueled by gushers of oil money.
As king he also bore the title of custodian of Islam’s holiest sites, Mecca and Medina, making him one of the faith’s most important figures.
Abdullah had grown accustomed to the levers of power long before his ascension to the throne in August 2005. After his predecessor, King Fahd, a half brother, had a stroke in November 1995, Abdullah, then the crown prince, ruled in the king’s name.
Yet Abdullah spoke as plainly as the Bedouin tribesmen with whom he had been sent to live in his youth. He refused to be called “your majesty” and discouraged commoners from kissing his hand. He shocked the 7,000 or so Saudi princes and princesses by cutting their allowances. He was described as ascetic, or as ascetic as someone in the habit of renting out entire hotels could be.
Abdullah’s reign was a constant effort to balance desert traditions with the demands of the modern world, making him appear at times to be shifting from one to the other.
When popular movements and insurgencies overthrew or threatened long-established Arab rulers from Tunisia to Yemen in 2011, he reacted swiftly.
On his return from three months of treatment for a herniated disk and a blood clot in New York and Morocco, his government spent $130 billion to build 500,000 units of low-income housing, to bolster the salaries of government employees and to ensure the loyalty of religious organizations.
He also created a Facebook page, where citizens were invited to present their grievances directly to him, although it was not known how many entries actually reached him.
But in at least two telephone calls he castigated President Obama for encouraging democracy in the Middle East, saying it was dangerous. And he showed no tolerance for the sort of dissent unfolding elsewhere.
The grand mufti, the kingdom’s highest religious official, proclaimed that Islam forbade street protests. Scores of protesters who failed to heed that message were arrested in the chiefly Shiite eastern provinces. A new law imposed crippling fines for offenses, like threatening national security, that could be broadly interpreted. Reaching beyond his borders, Abdullah sent tanks to help quell an uprising in neighboring Bahrain.
Moves of Moderation
President George W. Bush escorting Abdullah, then the crown prince, to Mr. Bush’s private office on his ranch in April 2005.Credit Pool photo by Rod Aydelotte
Still, Abdullah became, in some ways, a force of moderation. He contested Al Qaeda’s militant interpretations of the faith as justifying, even compelling, terrorist acts. He ordered that textbooks be purged of their most extreme language and sent 900 imams to re-education sessions. He had hundreds of militants arrested and some beheaded.
But he was also mindful that his family had, since the 18th century, derived its authority from an alliance with the strict Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam. He accordingly made only modest changes to the kingdom’s conservative clerical establishment. When Islamic State forces conquered vast stretches of Syria and Iraq, imposing a creed linked to Saudi Arabia’s own, the kingdom was slow to respond.
However, Abdullah chastised senior clerics for not speaking out more forcibly against the jihadists, and he eventually sent Saudi pilots to participate in an American-led campaign against the Islamic State.
Abdullah’s Saudi Arabia had hurtled from tribal pastoralism to advanced capitalism in little more than a generation. The fundamentalist clerics who gave the family legitimacy remained a powerful force. Women who appeared in public without the required covering risked arrest or a beating from the religious police.
Abdullah did make changes that were seen as important in the Saudi context. He allowed women to work as supermarket cashiers and appointed a woman as a deputy minister. At the $12.5 billion research university he built and named for himself, women study beside men.
However, he did not fulfill a promise made to Barbara Walters of ABC News in his first televised interview as king in October 2005: that he would allow women to drive, a hugely contentious issue in Saudi Arabia.
Although he ordered the kingdom’s first elections for municipal councils in 2005, a promised second election, in October 2009, in which women would vote, was postponed until September 2011. Then in March of that year, the Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs announced that the question of women voting would be put off indefinitely “because of the kingdom’s social customs.”
Abdullah’s greatest legacy, however, may prove to be a scholarship program that sent tens of thousands of young Saudi men and women abroad to study at Western universities and colleges. It has been suggested that the changes long resisted by conservative forces — resistance that even a king could not overcome — would one day come about as those men and women rose in the government, industry and academia.
Perhaps Abdullah’s most daunting challenge arrived in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, with the revelation that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. The royal family at first railed at what it called a vicious smear campaign against the kingdom, then ruthlessly suppressed known militants — not least because the monarchy itself was a main target of Al Qaeda.
Striking a balance was almost always Abdullah’s preference. He strove to keep oil prices high, but not so high that they prompted consumers to abandon petroleum, then hedged his bets by investing billions in solar energy research. In 2008, he convened a meeting of world religious leaders to promote tolerance, but held it in Madrid rather than Saudi Arabia, where the public practice of religions other than Islam is outlawed.
Yet Abdullah could, and did, take strong positions. He denounced the American-led invasion of Iraq as “an illegal occupation”; proposed a comprehensive peace plan for the Middle East that included recognition of Israel by Arab nations; and urged in a secret cable that the United States attack Iran, Saudi Arabia’s great rival. “Cut off the head off the snake,” he said.
His kingdom’s interests always came first. Although American companies discovered and developed the Saudi oil fields, he cut deals with Russian, Chinese and European petroleum companies. He made it clear that the world’s energy appetites mattered less than Saudi Arabia’s future.
A Rigorous Upbringing
Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud was born in Riyadh in 1924 into a vast, complicated family. His father, Abdul Aziz, had as many as 22 wives.
Abdul Aziz, whose ancestors founded a precursor to the present Saudi state in 1744, chose his wives partly to secure alliances with other Arabian tribes. Abdullah’s mother, Fahda bint Asi al-Shuraim, was a daughter of the chief of the Shammar, whose influence extended into Syria, Iraq and Jordan.
Abdullah in 2014.Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times
King Abdul Aziz was not an indulgent father to his dozens of sons. He was quoted as saying, “I train my own children to walk barefoot, to rise two hours before dawn, to eat but little, to ride horses bareback.”
When the young Abdullah once neglected to offer his seat to a guest, Abdul Aziz sentenced him to three days in prison.
Abdullah, who overcame a stutter, was educated in religion, Arab literature and science by Islamic scholars at the royal court. From the Bedouin nomads, he learned traditional ways, including horsemanship and desert warfare. In 1962, he was appointed commander of the National Guard, which draws recruits from the Bedouin tribes, protects the king and acts as a counterweight to the army.
Four of Abdullah’s half brothers preceded him to the throne.
King Khalid appointed Abdullah as second deputy prime minister in 1975. In 1982, Fahd, Khalid’s successor, named him deputy prime minister and crown prince.
After Fahd’s stroke, Abdullah ran the government at first as regent. Political pressures later forced the removal of the regent title, but Abdullah remained the effective decision maker. He refused to sign any official papers with his own name as long as his stricken brother lived. Fahd died on Aug. 1, 2005.
One of King Abdullah’s first official acts was to pardon two Libyans accused of plotting to kill him, a result of Egypt’s engineering a reconciliation between the two nations. He also pardoned three Saudi academics who were in prison for advocating a constitutional monarchy.
He went on to establish job-training programs to help ease severe unemployment among educated young Saudis, to develop long-wasted natural gas as a commodity that could be exported, and to bring Saudi Arabia into the World Trade Organization. He became the first Saudi head of state to meet a pope, Benedict XVI, in 2007.
Although he reaffirmed his kingdom’s longstanding alliance with the United States, tensions arose with events. Abdullah refused, for instance, to permit American bases on Saudi territory for the Iraq invasion in 2003, something he had allowed in the first Gulf War.
‘For the Greater Good’
The king also grappled with domestic crises. The deaths of 15 girls in a dormitory fire in Mecca in 2002 caused an international uproar when it was learned that the religious police had not let them escape because they were not properly dressed. Furious, the king dismissed the head of women’s education.
In 2007, he pardoned a teenage girl who had been sentenced to six months in jail and 100 lashes after being raped. She was convicted of being found in a car alone with a man who was not her relative, a crime in Saudi law.
Though Abdullah made it clear that he thought the girl was guilty, pleasing the religious authorities, he pardoned her, he said, “for the greater good.”
In line with Islamic law, Abdullah kept no more than four wives at once, and was married at least 13 times, said Joseph Kechichian, who studies the royal family as a senior fellow at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh.
Abdullah fathered at least seven sons, nearly all of whom have occupied powerful positions as provincial governors and officers in the national guard, Dr. Kechichian said. Of his 15 known daughters, one is a prominent physician, and another has appeared on television to advocate women’s rights.
Abdullah may have resembled his warrior father, but he had a modern sensibility. A diplomatic cable revealed by WikiLeaks in 2010 said that he had suggested to an American counterterrorism official that electronic chips be implanted in detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
He said it had worked with horses and falcons, to which the American replied, “Horses don’t have good lawyers.”
Correction: January 24, 2015 Because of an editing error, a picture caption on Friday with the continuation of an obituary about King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia misstated, in some editions, the day that his brother Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud announced that he had assumed the throne. As the obituary correctly noted, it was Friday, not Thursday.
Peggy Charren in 1978. She was a founder and president of Action for Children’s Television.Credit Barbara Alper/Getty Images
Peggy Charren, whose advocacy of higher-minded television programming for children took the issue to government agencies and the halls of Congress and led to landmark legislation, died on Thursday at her home in Dedham, Mass. She was 86.
The precise cause was uncertain, but she had had vascular dementia for many years, her daughter Deborah Charren said.
An inveterate cajoler, persuader, petitioner, testifier, public speaker and letter writer, Ms. Charren was “the principal defender of children’s television in America” and “a conscience sitting on the shoulder of every commercial broadcaster,” Senator Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat and a longtime friend of Ms. Charren’s, told The Boston Globe after her death.
She took up her crusade in the 1960s, when she was rearing two young daughters in a Boston suburb and was frustrated by what she saw on television for them — rampant advertising for toys and sugary cereals and, as she once put it, “wall-to-wall monster cartoons.”
Ms. Charren, an art and literature lover who had operated a gallery and run a business that held book fairs for children, was a founder and president of Action for Children’s Television, or ACT, whose first meeting was held in her Newton living room in 1968.
Seizing on a clause in the Federal Communications Act of 1934 that assigned broadcasters on the public airways a responsibility to tend to the public interest, ACT set about raising money and became a grass-roots force for change. The organization began pestering lawmakers, regulatory agencies and broadcast corporations to help educate children and not pander to them — to treat them as future contributors to society and not as just another consumer market.
The organization grew from a few women in a living room — they were typically referred to in early news reports as housewives — to a potent organization of more than 10,000 members.
By 1970, the group had won a petitioning campaign to reinstate “Captain Kangaroo” on a Boston station that had replaced it with another show. Members, all or nearly all women, met with the Federal Communications Commission and testified before the Senate subcommittee on communications.
Though they were rebuffed in their first attempts to meet with executives at NBC and ABC, they did get a meeting at CBS with the senior vice president for programming, Michael Dann. He told The New York Times that their suggestions were “among the most constructive and logical I have heard.”
Six months later, Mr. Dann resigned from CBS and took a 75 percent pay cut to become vice president of the Children’s Television Workshop, producers of a popular new show on public television called “Sesame Street.”
Led by Ms. Charren, ACT also persuaded the National Association of Broadcasters to reduce the amount of commercial time on children’s shows. It also persuaded networks to stop the practice of having children’s shows shill for the products of advertisers.
In 1974, the F.C.C. issued a Children’s Television Policy Statement, which made explicit the broadcasters’ responsibility to put “educational and informational” programming on the air.
The guidelines were not laws, however, and after Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, his distaste for regulation undid much of ACT’s progress. The Federal Trade Commission called a halt to an investigation, begun in 1978, into advertising on children’s television, and the F.C.C. stopped pushing for more quality programming for children.
“A marketplace approach simply doesn’t work for children,” Ms. Charren said in 1983. “Children’s television can never be profitable because most of the people who watch it are very short, very young and have very small allowances.”
She added: “Broadcasters will deliver as little service to children as they can get away with, because children are demographically unattractive to advertisers. During the ’70s, there was always at least the threat that if the networks didn’t do something for kids, the regulatory agencies would step in. Now, under Reagan, there isn’t even the threat.”
Ms. Charren’s calls for regulation drew criticism from some quarters. Animators, in particular, accused her of advocating censorship. She was adamant in her defense, however, saying that ACT never asked for a show to be taken off the air. When cable television began showing racier fare, she accepted that pornography was going to be available and promoted the idea that cable operators be required to provide users with lockout devices to block unwanted content. Her position was that there ought to be more programming, better programming and a diversification of it.
For Ms. Charren and ACT, the 1980s were an unending lobbying campaign that ended in victory. In 1990, Congress passed the Children’s Television Act, establishing standards for children’s television, limiting the number of advertising minutes permitted during a show, and mandating that stations document that they “served the educational and information needs of children” before they could have their licenses renewed.
Ms. Charren was born Peggy Sandelle Walzer on March 9, 1928, in Manhattan. Her father, Maxwell, was a furrier. Her mother, the former Ruth Rosenthal, was a pianist who gave up a potential concert career to raise a family. Peggy graduated from Hunter College High School and, in 1949, Connecticut College in New London.
She worked for a time in television, at WPIX in New York, before marrying Stanley Charren, a mechanical engineer who became an energy expert and entrepreneur, in 1951. They moved to Providence, R.I., where she opened an art gallery, and subsequently to the Boston area, where she started a company, Quality Book Fairs, that specialized in presentations for children.
Her initial ideas for improvements in children’s television involved putting books and the reading experience on the air.
“My mother loved books, and she loved libraries,” Deborah Charren said. “And she felt TV should be more like a library, with a variety of offerings.”
In addition to her daughter Deborah, Ms. Charren is survived by her husband; a sister, Barbara Korstvedt; another daughter, Claudia Moquin, known as Sandi; six grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.
In 1991, the year after the Children’s Television Act was passed, Ms. Charren was given a Peabody Award for her public service. In 1995 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Bill Clinton. ACT dissolved in 1992.
“We’ve done what we set out to do,” Ms. Charren said at the time. “And it’s going to take some time to see if it’s working. This is something that the local communities should be doing. We don’t want laws mandating good programs or censorship. We want the communities to tell broadcasters what’s missing.”
With a small telescope and our sky charts, you can watch a very sizable near-Earth asteroid race across winter’s constellations on the night of January 26-27.
The best place to look for nearby Earth-size planets are around the smallest, coolest stars. New research shows that any exoplanets tightly circling their stars might have a better chance of being habitable than previously thought.
Hubble Space Telescope observations are adding a third dimension to previously 2D images – and enlightening astronomers about the evolution of galaxies in the distant universe.
A waxing crescent Moon, dim Mars, and bright Venus show in the evening skies this weekend. Despite the growing Moon, fading Comet Lovejoy remains a lovely sight. Plus, don’t miss tonight’s rare triple shadow transit on Jupiter.
Comet Lovejoy is about magnitude 4.2, high in the evening sky for your binoculars or low-power, wide-field telescope. Catch these last best nights — the Moon starts to brighten the sky in just a few days!
For the second time in as many months, the periodic comet 15P/Finlay has surged in brightness. Spot it soon — before the Moon interferes — using our exclusive sky charts.
A police lieutenant in Charleston, W.Va., resigned yesterday just before he was scheduled to appear at a termination review hearing for producing racially insensitive videos involving his daughter dancing to KKK music.
Those who have seen the seven videos made by Lt. Terry Shawn Williams describe them as “disgusting and unspeakable,” Charleston station WCHS reported today.
“I knew when … I heard about [the videos] and when I saw them, this police officer was never going to wear a gun and a badge in the city of Charleston ever again,” Charleston Mayor Danny Jones said Wednesday. “They’re a whole lot more than racially insensitive.”
The videos, stored on Williams personal computer, surfaced last year as he was going through a divorce, the West Virginia MetroNews Network reported.
They reportedly show Williams’ young daughter dressed like a police officer and dancing to KKK music. The videos were shown privately to some Charleston City Council members in December, three months after Williams was placed on administrative leave. The mayor said he doesn’t regret that decision or a judge’s order sealing the tapes.
The mayor said the city didn’t leak word of the videos, which he suggested came from one of the “many people who were privy to the divorce.” Now, Jones said, “We don’t have to show them in a hearing and hopefully no one will ever see them again unless it’s in his divorce hearing.”
Williams’ decision to resign came on the eve of a hearing before a city police appeals board where he sought to appeal a decision by the department to fire him. The police officer, who frequently acted as the department’s media spokesman, has said he believes the investigation was politically motivated and that he knows about other incidents of racism within the police department.
To that, the mayor said Williams “was just trying to shed blame. He can go out … and make all the allegations he wants against us. Now, all he can do is go back to his klavern,” a reference to a KKK chapter.
“I knew he couldn’t win this case and apparently he finally did, too,” the mayor told MetroNews. “I think it’s a sad chapter in our history that’s finally come to an end.”
In his resignation letter to Police Chief Brent Webster, Williams said: “It is clear to me and most of the general public that I will not be able (to) resolve my personal problems based upon the way in which this administration has strategically ‘leaked’ and handled my internal investigation. In my sixteen years of service to this department, I have never before witnessed the ‘leaks’ from an internal investigation such as mine. Therefore, I feel that resigning is in the best interests for my family.”
Jones suggested the resignation also is in the city’s best interest, and now he vows to see that Williams’ police certification is revoked so he can’t become a police officer elsewhere.
“Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation’s history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement, and pray that our inner being may be sensitive to its guidance. For we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.
Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns, this query has often loomed large and loud: “Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent?” “Peace and civil rights don’t mix,” they say. “Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people?” they ask. And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live. In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church—the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate—leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.
I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides. Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans.
Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything on a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”
SOURCE: “Beyond Vietnam“, April 4, 1967, New York City, NY.
PHIL AFRICA, OF BLACK LIBERATION GROUP MOVE, LONG IN PRISON
Phil Africa, right, with Dick Gregory in Philadelphia in 1978.Credit Bill Ingraham/Associated Press
Phil Africa, a high-ranking member of the Philadelphia-based black-liberation group Move, who was serving a 30- to 100-year sentence in the 1978 fatal shooting of a police officer, died on Saturday at the state prison in Dallas, Pa., near Wilkes-Barre. He was 59.
A prison spokeswoman, Robin Lucas, attributed the death to unspecified natural causes.
Move is best known for the 24-hour siege at one of its houses in Philadelphia in 1985 that ended when the state police dropped a bomb, touching off a fire — the worst in the city’s history — that left 11 people dead and destroyed more than 60 homes. Phil Africa was in prison at the time.
Born William Phillips on Jan. 1, 1956, he adopted the surname Africa, as did the other eight defendants in his case, which stemmed from an earlier effort to oust Move from its West Philadelphia headquarters.
At that time, the administration of Mayor Frank L. Rizzo demanded that the building be vacated because of sanitary and building code violations. Members of the group responded by arming themselves and transforming the building into a fortress. Phil Africa was convicted of third-degree murder in a shootout that followed months of conflict.
In addition to the officer who was fatally shot, James Ramp, four officers and five firefighters were injured.
“Rehabilitation in this case would be absurd,” Judge Edwin S. Malmed of the Court of Common Pleas declared in passing sentence in 1981. “Anyone not revolted by the events of that day just doesn’t have a sound mind.”
Ramona Africa, a spokeswoman for Move, said on its website that Mr. Africa was the second of the nine defendants to die in prison, and described his death as suspicious.
“This is another example of how the system hates Move and will do anything to stop Move,” she said, adding, “Phil was a father figure to many.”
Ms. Lucas, the prison spokeswoman, said Mr. Africa had been in the prison infirmary for about a week.
JEAN-CLAUDE BAKER; RESTAURATEUR HONORED A CHANTEUSE
Jean-Claude Baker, right, and Josephine Baker in 1973.
Jean-Claude Baker, the flamboyant restaurateur who created the popular Manhattan nightspot Chez Josephine in memory of Josephine Baker, the exotically beautiful dancer and mesmerizing chanteuse who had cared for him as a lonely child in Paris and whose biography he published to acclaim in 1993, was found dead on Thursday at his home in East Hampton, N.Y. He was 71.
The cause was suicide, said Patrick Pacheco, a theater reporter and friend. Mr. Baker’s body was discovered in his car, Mr. Pacheco said.
Mr. Baker led a colorful and many-faceted life populated by boldface names. Living on his own in Paris by the time he was 14, he became a shrewd worker in hotels and restaurants with a gift for charming the clientele; while working at Le Pavillon Dauphine in 1960, he greeted the Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev, who, emerging from a limousine, reportedly kissed him on the lips.
A few years later Mr. Baker moved to West Berlin, where he had a career as a singer — he recorded under the name Jean-Claude Rousseau — and opened a nightclub called the Pimm’s Club. Sometimes called the Studio 54 of that era, it drew a mix of gay and straight customers and a glittering international crowd, including Mick Jagger, Mahalia Jackson, Leonard Bernstein, Rudolf Nureyev, Margot Fonteyn, Jessye Norman and Orson Welles.
Chez Josephine, a high-end brasserie and piano bar featuring luxuriant velvet curtains, red banquettes and Josephine Baker memorabilia, opened in 1986 on 42nd Street, between Ninth and 10th Avenues. It was an anchor in the transformation of a grim strip of real estate into an Off Broadway theater district.
From the start Chez Josephine was an eccentric pre- and post-theater spot — many Broadway theaters are within walking distance — and with its ripe décor redolent of Paris from an earlier age and Mr. Baker’s effervescent hospitality, it gathered its own coterie of the famous.
One regular was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Mr. Baker told a reporter that to protect her privacy, he once allowed her to use the men’s room while he stood guard. If she had used the women’s room, he said, other women would have flocked in after her.
Mr. Baker was born Jean-Claude Julien Leon Tronville in Dijon, France, on April 18, 1943. He met Josephine Baker in 1958 at the Hotel Scribe in Paris, where she was living at the time and where he was a teenage bellhop living on his own.
His parents, Constance Luce Tronville and Julien Rouzaud, were not married when he was born, though they married later, when Jean-Claude was 7 and then known by his father’s last name. Soon afterward, his father moved to Paris to work in a restaurant, and at 14, Jean-Claude went to search for him, leaving behind his mother and three younger sisters.
“What happened was, I found my father living in a hotel for prostitutes, where they rented rooms by the hour; he had gambled away all his money,” Mr. Baker wrote in the introduction to the biography “Josephine: The Hungry Heart,” written with Chris Chase. “Three days later, he disappeared, and didn’t come back.”
“Josephine listened to all this,” he wrote of their first encounter, “and then she said, ‘Don’t be worried, my little one; you have no father, but from today on, you will have two mothers.’ ”
They were not especially close at first, he wrote; their intimacy began when she went to Berlin in 1968, and he arranged for her to perform at the Pimm’s Club.
Her career was wobbly by then, but for much of the time before her death in 1975, Mr. Baker supported her, serving as manager, companion and amanuensis. He took her last name as his own in the early 1970s.
Mr. Baker is survived by his sisters, Marie-Josèphe Lottier, Marie-Annick Rouzaud and Martine Viellard.
Josephine Baker was notoriously difficult — self-involved and brilliant, capable of extraordinary kindness and extraordinary cruelty — and the colliding strains of her character, coupled with Mr. Baker’s complex relationship with her, drove him to write her biography, he said.
Their relationship also inspired him to amass an extensive collection of posters, paintings, documents and other memorabilia pertaining to early-20th-century African-American performers.
“Working with Chris Chase, Jean-Claude Baker has combined cultural and theatrical history with an intense Oedipal drama,” Margo Jefferson wrote in The New York Times about “The Hungry Heart.” “He met Baker when he was 14, and was unofficially adopted by her. Through the years she treated him like a son and like a serf.
“He read everything about her he could find, he writes, ‘because I loved her, hated her, and wanted desperately to understand her.’ Those emotions drove his book, and they drove him to do vast amounts of valuable research. The result is mesmerizing: a battle of wills with Josephine as the mastermind, concocting fables about her life, and Jean-Claude as the detective, breaking them down into facts.”
AL BENDICH, DEFENDER OF ‘HOWL’ AND LENNY BRUCE’S COMEDY
Al Bendich, right, with Lenny Bruce, a client in a major case.Credit Al Bendich Collection
Al Bendich, a lawyer who successfully defended the right to free speech in two landmark midcentury obscenity cases — involving Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” and Lenny Bruce’s nightclub act — died on Jan. 5 in Oakland, Calif. He was 85.
The apparent cause was a heart attack, his wife, Pamela Bendich, said.
Mr. Bendich was the last living member of the defense team in the “Howl” case, in which the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who had published and sold “Howl” in book form, stood trial in San Francisco in 1957.
He was the sole defense lawyer in the first of Bruce’s obscenity trials, in San Francisco in 1962. Of the four obscenity trials Bruce would go through, the San Francisco case was the only one to end in an acquittal.
“Al’s work set a standard for freedom of artistic expression,” the civil rights lawyer Michael E. Tigar said in a recent interview. “Can you imagine a world in which it could be a crime to say words that you can hear on cable TV every night? That’s the world of the Sixties, in which there were legal prohibitions of the work of Henry Miller and Allen Ginsberg and comedians such as Lenny Bruce. So this was pathbreaking.”
Al Bendich at Fantasy Records, where he helped the owner obtain the movie rights to “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”Credit Courtesy Saul Zaentz Company
More striking still is the fact that when Mr. Bendich wrote the brief in the “Howl” case — a document widely considered to have brought about the defense victory — he was just two years out of law school.
Albert Morris Bendich (pronounced BEN-dick) was born in New York City on June 18, 1929. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1950, followed by a master’s in economics and, in 1955, a law degree there. He joined the staff of the Northern California American Civil Liberties Union in 1957.
That June, the United States Supreme Court had issued a ruling in an obscenity case, Roth v. United States, which deemed speech found to be obscene an exception to First Amendment protections.
“It said that this subcategory of sexually oriented expression is completely beyond the First Amendment pale — it can be absolutely criminalized,” Nadine Strossen, a past president of the national A.C.L.U., explained in an interview. “And that had an enormous chilling impact.”
Mr. Ferlinghetti’s trial was scheduled to start soon; he had been charged with publishing and selling obscene material after he offered copies of “Howl” for sale in the City Lights bookstore, the San Francisco institution he had helped found. The Roth ruling carried potentially grave implications for “Howl,” which was rife with sexually explicit language.
“It was incredibly important to provide persuasive arguments to the judge in that case about how he should construe the Supreme Court exception narrowly,” Ms. Strossen said. “And in such a way that it didn’t extend to ‘Howl’ or City Lights bookstore.”
Mr. Ferlinghetti’s trial — a bench trial, with no jury — opened in San Francisco Municipal Court on Aug. 16, 1957, before Judge Clayton W. Horn. The defense team was led by Jacob W. Ehrlich, a larger-than-life litigator given to sartorially extravagant courtroom presentations.
“He wore cuff links that at the time cost $25,000” — more than $200,000 today — Ronald K. L. Collins, a professor at the University of Washington School of Law who has written about the case, said in an interview. (“Sam Benedict,” a television series starring Edmond O’Brien and based on Mr. Ehrlich’s career, was broadcast on NBC from 1962 to 1963.)
Mr. Ehrlich, assisted by the civil liberties lawyer Lawrence Speiser, would handle most of the courtroom arguments.
“Jake Ehrlich spent most of our time reading from books like ‘Moll Flanders’ to prove that this was nothing new,” Mr. Ferlinghetti said in an interview on Tuesday. “And we were left with only a few minutes at the very end for Al to make the constitutional points on which the case was won.”
It also fell to Mr. Bendich — “the guy at the bottom of the totem pole,” Mr. Collins said — to write the crucial document known familiarly as a brief but more formally as a legal memorandum. Judge Horn would consult it in drawing up his ruling.
In Judge Horn, a Sunday school teacher in his spare time, the defense seemingly could not have drawn a less sympathetic jurist.
“He’s a man of the Lord,” said Mr. Collins, whose 2013 book, “Mania,” written with David M. Skover, chronicles the “Howl” trial. “Before this case, five women were in his court for shoplifting. And what was the sentence he gave them? They had to go and watch the movie ‘The Ten Commandments’ ” — released in 1956 and then playing in theaters — “write an essay and then come back and read it to him in court.”
On Oct. 3, 1957, Judge Horn delivered his opinion. That he produced a written opinion was noteworthy in itself.
“Rarely if ever will a municipal judge get a First Amendment case,” Mr. Collins said. “If you think about the kind of cases he gets — traffic violations, littering — he’s not going to write an opinion in those cases.”
Mr. Bendich in 2000. He was an A.C.L.U. lawyer in the ’60s.Credit Steve Maruta
More than 4,000 words long, Judge Horn’s opinion concluded: “In considering material claimed to be obscene it is well to remember the motto ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense.’ (Evil to him who evil thinks.) Therefore, I conclude the book ‘Howl and Other Poems’ does have some redeeming social importance, and I find the book is not obscene.”
The full opinion mirrored, “in structure and substance, the central points that Al Bendich made in his memorandum,” Mr. Collins said. He added: “If you took into consideration Jake Ehrlich’s arguments and Speiser’s contributions, it may well be that they disposed the judge to rule the way that he did. But then he needed the law to support it, and that’s where Bendich comes in. To use a basketball analogy, they did the setup; he did the dunk.”
On Oct. 4, 1961, Bruce was arrested after a profanity-laden performance at a San Francisco nightclub. His trial began on March 5, 1962; Judge Horn again presided. The judge’s presence now seemed to augur well for the defense, but Bruce, ever the contrarian, demanded a jury trial.
“Bruce had this romanticized view of ‘the people,’ ” said Mr. Collins, also the author, with Mr. Skover, of “The Trials of Lenny Bruce” (2002). “So Bendich has to do two things if he plans to win this trial. He has to have an array of witnesses — sociologists and others — to support the idea that certain forms of ribald comedy really further the importance of comedy. He also has to be very skilled in cross-examining the state’s witnesses. But he does one more thing that will prove to be extremely important: He writes jury instructions” — the proposal that the judge considers, with that of the prosecution, before making his charge to the jury.
On March 8, the jury heard Judge Horn’s instructions, which were, Mr. Collins said, “either verbatim or very close to the ones Bendich gave him.” Retiring, they deliberated for 5 hours and 25 minutes before acquitting Bruce.
From newspaper interviews afterward, “it was pretty clear that if it weren’t for those instructions, they were going to convict,” Mr. Collins said.
A resident of Berkeley, Mr. Bendich taught speech at the University of California there in the 1960s. Other seminal cases on which he worked included Parrish v. Civil Service Commission, a 1967 California Supreme Court case that ensured the constitutional rights of recipients of public assistance.
At his death Mr. Bendich was a co-president of the Saul Zaentz Company, an entertainment concern in Berkeley. He joined the company, originally Fantasy Records, in the late 1960s; in the ’70s, after Mr. Zaentz began producing feature films, Mr. Bendich helped him secure the rights to Ken Kesey’s novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” The film version, co-produced by Mr. Zaentz, was released in 1975.
Mr. Bendich’s first marriage, to Hilary Solomon, ended in divorce. Besides his wife, the former Pamela Strebel, his survivors include three children from his first marriage, Nora Bendich Oldwin, Jonathan Bendich and Bridget Bendich; a daughter from his second marriage, Adrianne Bendich Keffeler; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
More than half a century later, the “Howl” case and Bruce’s San Francisco trial remain high-water marks in First Amendment law.
“If it were not for Al Bendich making the constitutional points that won the ‘Howl’ trial for us, the prosecution of publishers who publish something that could be judged obscene would have gone on and on,” Mr. Ferlinghetti said. “But as it was, even though this was only a municipal court, this was a precedent that stood up all these years. It was no longer possible for some narrow-minded local authority to win a case against a book for obscenity.”
Throughout his courtroom career, Mr. Bendich’s ready wit stood him in good stead. This was perhaps nowhere more evident than in the Bruce trial, where, in his opening statement, he discussed the time-honored role of comedy as a vehicle for social criticism.
In his memoir, “How to Talk Dirty and Influence People,” Bruce recalled what transpired:
“We are going to prove, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that the nature of Mr. Bruce’s performance on the night of October the fourth was in the great tradition of social satire, related intimately to the kind of social satire to be found in the works of such great authors as Aristophanes, Jonathan Swift——”
The prosecutor would have none of this. “I’m going to object,” he interrupted. “Aristophanes is not testifying here.”
“Your Honor,” Mr. Bendich shot back, “I didn’t say I would call Mr. Aristophanes.”
DOROTHY THOMAS, THE ‘MOTHER’ OF BONE MARROW TRANSPLANTS
Dorothy Thomas and her husband, Dr. E. Donnall Thomas. The couple worked together on research into transplants that could cure dying patients of leukemia.Credit Jim Linna
Dorothy Thomas, a partner in her husband’s Nobel Prize-winning research into bone marrow transplants, died on Jan. 9 at her home near Seattle. She was 92.
Her death was announced by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, where her husband, Dr. E. Donnall Thomas, had been the director of the clinical research division.
In 1990, Dr. Thomas and another American shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for demonstrating to skeptics that transplanting organs and bone marrow could cure dying patients of leukemia and other forms of cancer.
Mrs. Thomas had worked so closely with her husband, helping to manage his research and write his papers, that Dr. George Santos, a transplant specialist at Johns Hopkins, said at the time that if Dr. Thomas was the father of bone marrow transplants, “then Dottie Thomas is the mother.”
Dr. Thomas, who died in 2012, once explained their partnership this way:
“In the laboratory days, my friends pointed out that Dottie, who had the library experience, would go to the library and look up all the background information for a study that we were going to do, and then she would go into the laboratory and do the work and get the data, and then with her writing skills, she’d write the paper and complete the bibliography,” he said. “All I would do is sign the letter to the editor.”
Dr. Fred Appelbaum, executive vice president and deputy director of the Hutchinson Center, recalled that “Dottie was there at Don’s side through every part of developing marrow transplantation as a science.”
She is survived by their children, Dr. E. Donnall Thomas Jr., Jeffrey Thomas, and Dr. Elaine Thomas; eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Dorothy Elaine Martin was born on Sept. 18, 1922, in San Antonio, Tex.
She was a freshman at the University of Texas when Dr. Thomas, a senior, was waiting tables in the girls’ dormitory. After breakfast one morning, students encountered a surprise snowstorm.
“This girl whacked me in the face with a snowball,” Dr. Thomas told The Seattle Times in 1999. “She still claims she was throwing it at another fellow and hit me by mistake. One thing led to another, and we seemed to hit it off.”
They married in 1942. Mrs. Thomas was majoring in journalism when her husband was admitted to Harvard Medical School. Since she liked science, she decided to change her profession.
She enrolled in a medical technology program at New England Deaconess Hospital, became a hematology technician, and worked part-time in Dr. Thomas’s laboratory while their children were small.
The couple moved to Seattle in 1963. Dr. Thomas joined the Hutchinson Center when it opened in 1975. For the next 15 years his wife served as the chief administrator for its clinical research division. Dr. Thomas left the clinical leadership position in 1990 but remained with the center until his death.
Dr. Thomas’s research provided ways to overcome resistance to transplants by patients’ immune systems and allowed doctors to cure thousands of patients who would otherwise have been doomed by leukemia and other blood cancers. When he was awakened at 3:40 a.m. by news of the Nobel Prize award in 1990, he responded magnanimously.
“I’m pleased for my wife and for me and for my team and for the cancer center,” he said.
Update: The RNC voted yesterday to censure its member Dave Agema for posting material on social media that is insensitive to gays, Muslims and African Americans. Ironically, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus is working closing with a group, American Family Association, that could be described in the exact same way.
It’s only been a few weeks since we learned that majority whip Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) had spoken to a white supremacist group in 2002, and again the Republican Party has a scandal about race on its hands.
As the RNC gathers today in San Diego for its annual strategy meeting to draft plans for its future, particularly how it will improve its outreach to minorities, another prominent GOP lawmaker has been discovered to be a fan of white supremacist thinking.
Dave Agema, a member of the Republican National Committee from Michigan, republished an essay by the white nationalist publication American Renaissance in a New Year’s Eve Facebook post. The racist article, par for the course for American Renaissance, said “blacks are different by almost any measure to all other people. They cannot reason as well. They cannot communicate as well. They cannot control their impulses as well. They are a threat to all who cross their paths, black and non-black alike.”
Agema reportedly found it “very enlightening.” Can that possibly be true?
Agema has since pulled the piece down, but he refuses to apologize or resign from the RNC. And this isn’t his first racist rodeo.
According to the National Journal, Agema has a well-documented history of making inflammatory and false remarks, such as that President Obama is a Muslim. The Journal points to another Agema Facebook faux pas. He apparently shared what he called an “eye opening” essay that posed the question: “Have you ever seen a Muslim do anything that contributes positively to the American way of life?”
At least in this case, some in the RNC have reacted appropriately by calling for Agema to resign or be removed. They include RNC head Reince Priebus and Michigan’s entire GOP delegation. That’s all well and very good, but where’s the outrage from Priebus or other prominent Republicans over Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s plan to hold a prayer rally with the American Family Association (AFA)? Emails to Priebus’ and Jindal’s offices asking for comment were not returned.
On Jan. 24, Jindal, with AFA backing, will be praying at Louisiana State University in an event billed as “The Revival.” His partner, AFA, has defamed immigrants, the LGBT community and women. And just like American Renaissance, it has had horrible things to say about black people.
Let’s take a look at Jindal’s prayer partners.
An AFA leader has said, “Homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and 6 million dead Jews.”
The same staffer said African Americans “rut like rabbits” and women have no place in politics or the military.
Another has argued that Hispanics are “socialists by nature” and come to the United States to “plunder” our country.
And the group has repeatedly made the point that non-Christians are second-class citizens—“we are a Christian nation, and not a Jewish or Muslim one.” (Find a comprehensive look at AFA’s extremist statements and positions here).
Given a track record like that, I have to ask where’s the outrage from Jindal’s fellow Republicans? American Renaissance is clearly racist, but so are these statements about black people and Latinos. Shouldn’t they be condemned as well? And what about blaming gay people for the Holocaust?
So, if Agema is the big Republican elephant in the room stalking the GOP’s efforts to reach out to minorities, isn’t that true as well of any politician who is close to AFA?
Sadly the hypocrisy goes much deeper. As RNC Chair Priebus has berated Agema, rightly saying, “The tone and rhetoric from Agema is consistently offensive and has no place in politics or any rational conversation,” the chairman is also working closely with AFA.
At the end of this month, Priebus is leading an all expenses paid trip to Jerusalem for RNC members. So far, about 60 members (about 36 percent) of the RNC have accepted the offer, according to Haaretz.
And guess who is picking up the tab for this “incredible opportunity” Priebus is offering his fellow RNC members? You guessed right: the AFA.
Ann
BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS 
