International Jazz Day celebrates the historical, cultural, and educational contribution of this popular genre of music. The day aims to spread international awareness about this unique musical style; and to promote the cultural, and social values that Jazz stands for.
Background
Jazz is a uniquely American musical style that emerged out of the slave experience, primarily in southern United States. It is deeply rooted in the rich musical, and cultural traditions of Africa, and is heavily influenced by European music. New Orleans is generally considered to be the birthplace of this popular musical form, which is now seen as a voice of freedom and empowerment, and a statement against injustice, and oppression all around the world.
Today, Jazz has spread all over the globe, and is constantly evolving, being influenced by, and influencing other musical forms and genres.
The initiative to create an International Day of Jazz came from American Jazz pianist, composer, and UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for Intercultural Dialogues, Herbie Hancock. The purpose of the initiative was to focus global attention to the role that Jazz has played in breaking down race and gender barriers around the world; and in promoting cooperation; mutual understanding, and communication; peace and freedom.
Celebrations
Several activities mark the celebration of International Jazz Day, including Jazz concerts and performances, film screenings, and conference and panel discussions.
The Day of Remembrance for all Victims of Chemical Warfare gives people the chance to pay tribute to the victims of chemical warfare. It also allows governments and organizations to commit or reaffirm their commitment to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), an organization that aims to end the threat of chemical weapons and promote the peace and security worldwide.
Public life
The Day of Remembrance for all Victims of Chemical Warfare is a UN observance and not a public holiday on April 29.
Background
In November 2005 the UN decided to observe a memorial “Day of Remembrance for all Victims of Chemical Warfare” on April 29 each year. The date April 29 was chosen for this observance because it was when the Chemical Weapons Convention came into force.
Organizations such as the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the United Nations (UN) actively promote the World Day for Safety and Health at Work on April 28 every year.
The UN, ILO and other organizations, communities, individuals, and government bodies with an interest in workplace health and safety unite on or around April 28 to promote an international campaign known as World Day for Safety and Health at Work. The UN posts this event in its events calendar each year.
Community leaders and organizational representatives often promote the day by speaking out on issues such as workplace health and safety standards. Various media have promoted the day through news articles and broadcast programs. Different types of events and activities that center on workplace health and safety are held in many countries on or around April 28 each year.
Public Life
The World Day for Safety and Health at Work is an observance and is not a public holiday.
Background
The International Labour Organization (ILO) started observing the World Day for Safety and Health at Work on April 28, 2003. The ILO is devoted to advancing opportunities for people to obtain decent and productive work in conditions of freedom, equity, security and human dignity. It aims to promote rights at work, encourage decent employment opportunities, boost social protection, and strengthen dialogue in work-related issues.
World Intellectual Property Day is observed on April 26 each year with a variety of events and activities worldwide. It aims to increase people’s awareness and understanding of intellectual property (IP). World Intellectual Property Day is sometimes referred as World IP Day.
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) works together with various government agencies, non-government organizations, community groups and individuals to hold different events and activities to promote World Intellectual Property Day each year. Activities and events may include (but are not exclusive to):
Stage concerts or other public performances centered around the around the World IP Day theme, with the performers delivering messages which encourage respect for creators and creativity.
Essay competitions for young people on themes relating to intellectual property, innovation, piracy, counterfeiting, and other similar issues.
Seminars or free lectures in universities to build awareness of intellectual property and its benefits among students, faculty and researchers.
Exhibits in museums, art galleries, schools and other educational institutions, with presentations explaining the link between exhibitions, innovation and intellectual property.
Some local intellectual and copyright offices may have an open day on or around April 26 to promote World IP Day. Some educational institutions may choose World IP Day as a time to celebrate the works of a notable inventor, artist, designer, or entrepreneur, and link discussions with the important role of intellectual property.
Public life
World Intellectual Property Day, also known as World IP Day, is an observance held in many places around the world. It is not designated as a special public holiday.
Background
WIPO is a specialized agency of the United Nations. It is dedicated to developing a balanced and accessible international intellectual property (IP) system, which rewards creativity, stimulates innovation and contributes to economic development while safeguarding the public interest.
WIPO decided in 2000 to designate an annual World Intellectual Property Day to address the perceived gap between IP as a business/legal concept and its relevance to people’s lives. April 26 was chosen as the date upon which the convention establishing WIPO first entered into force in 1970.
WIPO plays a key role in organizing World IP Day. The activities, events and campaigns that focus on World IP Day seek to increase public understanding of what IP really means, and to demonstrate how the IP system fosters not only music, arts and entertainments, but also all products and technological innovations that help to shape the world.
ELLEN TURNER; OPENED KITCHEN TO FEED THE NEEDY OF KNOXVILLE
Ellen Turner, left, and her twin sister, Helen Ashe, in aprons Oprah Winfrey gave them when they appeared on her show.Credit The Love Kitchen
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Ellen Turner, who with her twin sister founded the Love Kitchen, which feeds several hundred people a week and drew national attention, died here on Wednesday. She was 87.
Her death was confirmed by Stanley Cash, her great-nephew.
Ms. Turner and her twin sister, Helen Ashe, worked as nurses before founding the Love Kitchen in 1986 in a church basement here with the mission to serve what they called the five H’s: the hungry, homeless, helpless, hopeless and homebound. The Love Kitchen provides clothing and meals from a building on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue and delivers food to people who cannot leave their homes.
Dressed in matching outfits and aprons, Ms. Turner and her sister did the cooking and oversaw the work of dozens of volunteers. They appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and “Secret Millionaire” in 2011 and were the subject of segments on NBC News and CNN.
Patrick Riggins, president of the Love Kitchen’s board, said the sisters often recounted three lessons their father had taught them: “There is only one father, and that is the Father in heaven. There is only one race, the human race. And never take the last piece of bread. Someone may come by in need of it.”
Ms. Turner, who bragged that she was five minutes older than her sister, was born to sharecropper parents, John Liddell and the former Alice White, on March 8, 1928, in Abbeville, S.C. She and her sister were sent almost daily to what was called the “big house” on the farm property to do chores before school.
“They grew up working,” Mr. Riggins said. “Ellen always said the people who owned the land treated them very well. But then there were others who didn’t.”
Mr. Cash noted that Ms. Turner and her sister had a strict religious upbringing. “They grew up their whole life together,” he said. “Dating at that time wasn’t like it is today. Socializing with young ladies was done through a church, on the up and up, not in a dark movie theater.”
He added: “So whenever one of the twins went on a date, the other sister was there, playing third wheel, like a chaperone. Sometimes they would mess with their dates, switching each other on their date to see if he could tell the difference.”
They moved to Knoxville after high school to attend nursing school. Mr. Riggins said the idea to start the Love Kitchen, which is staffed solely by volunteers and operates strictly on donations, came from seeing indigent patients coming into the hospital.
“Ellen was warm, genuine and compassionate,” Gov. Bill Haslam, a former Knoxville mayor, said in a statement. “Her smile could turn around a bad day instantly.”
Ms. Turner’s husband, Leon, died in 2002. Besides her sister and Mr. Cash, survivors include several nephews and nieces.
“It’s like a family there,” Jerri Shelley said of the Love Kitchen, where she has volunteered for nearly 25 years. “This is going to affect the Knoxville community tremendously. There’s so many people that these two women have touched over the years.”
MARY KEFE, MODEL FOR ROCKWELL’S ‘ROSIE THE RIVETER’
Mary Keefe and Norman Rockwell with a Saturday Evening Post cover for which he painted her as “Rosie the Riveter.”Credit Norman Rockwell Museum Digital Collections
Mary Keefe, a 19-year-old Vermont telephone operator whom her neighbor Norman Rockwell immortalized as his model for the heroine of “Rosie the Riveter,” the World War II feminist anthem that empowered women to leave home and pinch-hit in military plants, died on Tuesday at her home in Simsbury, Conn. She was 92.
Her death was confirmed by her daughter Mary Ellen Keefe.
Mrs. Keefe was a redhead, like the Rosie who appeared on the cover of the Memorial Day issue of The Saturday Evening Post magazine in 1943, but she had never wielded a rivet gun (not until an appearance on the “Tonight” show in the 1990s).
And as portrayed in the painting, she was considerably bulked up from her petite 110 pounds to embody muscular American can-do spirit — an image inspired by Michelangelo’s Isaiah on the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling. (It is often confused with J. Howard Miller’s wartime “We Can Do It” poster for Westinghouse Electric, from February 1943, showing a biceps-flexing uniformed woman in a red-and-white polka-dot bandanna.)
“Except for the red hair I had at the time, and my face, the rest I don’t think is me at all,” Mrs. Keefe said in a 2002 interview for the Norman Rockwell Museum.
Penny Colman, author of the 1995 book “Rosie the Riveter: Women Working on the Home Front in World War II,” said the Rockwell painting “is iconic because it portrays a rarity — an image of a powerful woman with a don’t-mess-with-me attitude.”
To Chris Crosman, the founding curator of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., which bought the painting in 2009 from a Colorado gallery, the work “is emblematic of a sea change in American culture.”
“Importantly,” he said in a statement, “the artist’s depiction celebrates, even helps to invent, due to mass distribution as a War Bond poster and magazine cover, the beginnings of gender equality.”
In the museum interview, Mrs. Keefe recalled that Rockwell “was trying to get people to realize that all the women could help out with the war effort when the men were away.”
When she posed for his photographer, she wore dungarees, changed from saddle shoes into penny loafers and was equipped with both a visor and superfluous goggles. Rockwell added touches to make her look more feminine, she said, tucking a gold-trimmed compact and lace-edged handkerchief in her pocket and having her wear lipstick, rouge and polished nails — to “make you think of it being a feminist woman, but also working for the war effort,” she said.
Mary Louise Doyle was born in Bennington, Vt., on July 30, 1922. Her father, John, was a logger. Her mother, the former Sarah Smith, operated a restaurant in nearby Arlington, took in boarders and ran a telephone exchange from her house, where neighbors, including Rockwell, came to pay their bill.
Mary Doyle graduated from Temple University, became a dental hygienist and married Robert Keefe, who died in 2003. In addition to her daughter Mary Ellen, she is survived by another daughter, Barbara K. Boska; two sons, William and Robert; 11 grandchildren and 5 great-grandchildren. She lived at various times in Vermont, Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
Rockwell, who painted 321 covers for The Saturday Evening Post, was primed to create Rosie by a 1942 song, “Rosie the Riveter,” by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb. They had apparently been inspired by a “Cholly Knickerbocker” syndicated newspaper column by Igor Cassini about Rosalind P. Walter, a 19-year-old high school graduate who had done her part for the war effort by going to work as a riveter in an aircraft factory in Stratford, Conn. (She became a noted benefactor of public television.)
The bandleader Kay Kyser, the vocal harmony group the Four Vagabonds and others recorded the hit song, whose lyrics included these:
All the day long, whether rain or shine
She’s a part of the assembly line
She’s making history, working for victory
Rosie [mimicking the rat-a-tat-tat of a riveter] the riveter
Mrs. Keefe posed as Rosie not for Rockwell but for his photographer, Gene Pelham, in two sessions, lasting about two hours in all. She was paid $5 (roughly $144 in today’s dollars) per session.
In the finished 52-by-40-inch painting, Rosie’s red hair, white skin and blue work shirt are superimposed on an American flag. Her head is adorned by a halo, and her right loafer crushes a copy of Hitler’s manifesto, “Mein Kampf.” She is holding a ham sandwich. Her name is painted on her lunchbox.
Promotional placards advertising the May 29, 1943, issue of The Post featured the cover and the title “Rosie the Riveter,” but the Curtis Publishing Company, according to the local Vermont newspaper, withdrew the placards for fear of infringing on the song’s copyright.
The painting was eventually donated to the Treasury Department’s War Loan Drive, which raffled it off. The winner was identified as Mrs. P. R. Eichenberg of Mount Lebanon, Pa. Art dealers said it was later owned by Chicago Pneumatic and Dresser Industries, makers of rivet guns and drills, and S. B. Lewis, a New York arbitrageur, who auctioned it off at Sotheby’s to the Elliott Yeary Gallery of Aspen, Colo., in 2002 for $4.9 million, which was believed to be the highest price fetched for a Rockwell at public auction at that time.
It was bought, presumably for more, in 2007 for the Crystal Bridges Museum, which was founded by Alice Walton, the Walmart heiress. A museum spokeswoman, Beth Bobbitt, would not disclose the sales figure. “When a work of art is acquired, it is chosen for its contribution to telling the American story,” she said. “The focus on price could detract from the importance of the work.”
Mrs. Keefe was not the only neighbor whom Rockwell recruited to pose for paintings. An uncle of hers, for example, was in Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms.”
“He called me one day and he said, ‘Mary, I apologize, but I made you very large,’ ” Mrs. Keefe recalled before the Sotheby’s sale. “Of course, as a young girl, I said, ‘Oh, that’s all right.’ But when I saw it, that was a different story.”
She was mollified a bit in 1967, however, when she received a letter from Rockwell. “The kidding you took was all my fault,” he wrote, “because I really thought you were the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.”
The movie reviewer Richard Corliss in Times Square in 1987.Credit Bill Foley/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty Images
Richard Corliss, whose well-informed and spirited movie reviews appeared in Time magazine for 35 years, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 71.
His wife, Mary, said the cause was complications of a stroke. He had been in a hospice care center.
A prolific contributor to Time who also wrote profiles, essays on popular culture, and television and theater reviews, Mr. Corliss was known for his firm opinions and punchy prose, melding the forthright Time style and its compact format to a joy in deadline invention.
An unabashed movie fan who believed that a couple of hours in a theater was time well spent no matter what the movie was — “Everything is worth seeing,” he often said, as Time’s Richard Zoglin wrote in an obituary on the magazine’s website — he was nonetheless hardly a pushover as a critic and occasionally relished the contrarian view.
Among the popular films he disdained were Robert Altman’s “M*A*S*H,” the basis for the television show about American Army surgeons during the Korean War, about which he wrote in The New York Times (before his tenure at Time began) that the supposedly charming and mischievous protagonists were boorish bullies; “Titanic,” the James Cameron hit whose special effects Mr. Corliss praised but whose dramatic storytelling he panned, and whose economic prospects he got spectacularly wrong (“Dead in the water,” he predicted); “A Chorus Line,” Richard Attenborough’s adaptation of the long-running Broadway musical that Mr. Corliss found, at best, inoffensive; and “The Full Monty,” the British comedy about laid-off steelworkers who concoct a striptease act, which he condemned as a formulaically sentimental audience-pleaser, lumping it with “Ghost,” “Cinema Paradiso” and other, in his phrase, “masterpieces of emotional pornography.”
Even so, Mr. Corliss’s work shone brightest when he could vent his eclectic enthusiasms, from George Lucas and Quentin Tarantino to Ingmar Bergman and François Truffaut, from Chinese kung fu films to Disney animation, from high-minded, ambience-saturated dramas like Anthony Minghella’s “The English Patient” to quirky teen tales like John Hughes’s “The Breakfast Club.”
“For most folks, déjà vu may provoke a momentary shudder, the creepy sense of having sidestepped into the twilight zone,” he wrote in 1993. “For Hollywood, though, it is a guiding principle. The industry wants audiences to feel they have seen this thing before but don’t know where or when. Nearly every movie plot is a reprise of a story that has already worked. Recombinant familiarity means box office; originality is an orphan, subversive and suspect. So let’s all cheer the emergence of ‘Groundhog Day,’ a very original comedy about déjà vu.”
Mr. Corliss promoted screenwriters against the headwind of opinion that said movies were made by auteur directors. He expressed adoration of movie stars as different as James Stewart and Cameron Diaz. In a 1985 review of the comedy-thriller “Into the Night,” he described Michelle Pfeiffer as “drop-dead gorgeous,” helping to popularize the phrase.
Richard Nelson Corliss was born in Philadelphia on March 6, 1944. His father, Paul, ran a business that manufactured chain-link fencing. His mother, the former Elizabeth McKluskey, taught first grade. After graduation from St. Joseph’s College (now University) in Philadelphia, Mr. Corliss did graduate work in film studies at Columbia, where he earned a master’s degree, and New York University.
In 1968, he met Mary Yushak, who was running the film stills department at the Museum of Modern Art; they married the next year. In addition to her, he is survived by a brother, Paul.
Mr. Corliss wrote about film for The Times, National Review and other publications in the late 1960s and ’70s. In 1970 he became editor of Film Comment, a journal, founded in the early 1960s, that was devoted largely to so-called art films, then the catchall term for independent films and documentaries.
During Mr. Corliss’s tenure, which lasted until the early 1980s, the magazine went from publishing quarterly to bimonthly and began including more essays and criticism about studio movies and Hollywood history. After the Film Society of Lincoln Center, sponsor of the New York Film Festival, took over the magazine’s publisher, Mr. Corliss served for many years on the festival’s selection committee. He joined Time in 1980 and shared movie critic’s duties there with Richard Schickel.
His books include “Talking Pictures” (1974), a survey, and critical defense, of American screenwriters; a 1994 study of “Lolita,” the Stanley Kubrick adaptation of the Nabokov novel; and an illustrated history, “Mom in the Movies: The Iconic Screen Mothers You Love and a Few You Love to Hate” (2014).
In 1990, exasperated by what he saw as a flourishing crop of glib critics on television and the onset of a thumbs-up/thumbs-down style of reviewing, Mr. Corliss defended his craft in an angry essay in Film Comment.
“The long view of cinema aesthetics is irrelevant to a moviegoer for whom history began with ‘Star Wars’,” he wrote. “A well-turned phrase is so much throat-clearing to a reader who wants the critic to cut to the chase: What movie is worth my two hours and six bucks this weekend? Movie criticism of the elevated sort, as practiced over the past half-century by James Agee and Manny Farber, Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, J. Hoberman and Dave Kehr — in the mainstream press and in magazines like ‘Film Comment’— is an endangered species. Once it flourished; soon it may perish, to be replaced by a consumer service that is no brains and all thumbs.”
Johnny Kemp.Credit Raymond Boyd/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Johnny Kemp, a Bahamian R&B singer best known for the 1988 hit song “Just Got Paid,” was found dead on April 16 in Montego Bay, Jamaica. He was 55.
The police said that his body was found floating at a beach and was believed to have drowned but provided no other details.
Reach Media, the parent company of “The Tom Joyner Morning Show,” said that Mr. Kemp had been scheduled to be on a Caribbean cruise sponsored by the Tom Joyner Foundation. He had not yet boarded the ship, the company said. Mr. Kemp was nominated for a Grammy Award for “Just Got Paid,” which reached No. 1 on the Billboard R&B chart and No. 10 on the pop chart. He had been performing around the United States in recent years.
He was born in the Bahamas on Aug. 2, 1959, and began singing in nightclubs there at 13. He moved to New York City in 1979, lived in Harlem and worked as a session vocalist and songwriter before landing a solo contract with Columbia Records, according to online biographies.
“Just Got Paid” appeared on his second album for Columbia, “Secrets of Flying.”
He is survived by his wife, Deirdre Fisher-Kemp, and their two sons.
Correction: April 23, 2015
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this obituary misstated the year Mr. Kemp’s song “Just Got Paid” was a hit. It was 1988, not 1989.
World Malaria Day gives people the chance to promote or learn about the efforts made to prevent and reduce Malaria around the world. It is observed on April 25 each year.
Organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), which is the United Nations’ (UN) directing and coordinating authority for health, actively play a role in promoting and supporting World Malaria Day. The activities and events that take place on or around World Malaria Day are often joint efforts between governments, non-government organizations, communities and individuals. Countries that have been involved in actively participating in World Malaria Day include (but are not exclusive to):
Belgium.
Denmark.
Ethiopia.
Cameroon.
Germany
Mozambique.
Switzerland.
Uganda.
United States.
Zambia
Many people, as well as commercial businesses and not-for-profit organizations, will use the day as an opportunity to donate money towards key malaria interventions. Many fundraising events are held to support the prevention, treatment and control of malaria. Some people may also use the observance to write letters or petitions to political leaders, calling for greater support towards protecting and treating people who are at risk of malaria. Many newspapers, websites, and magazines, as well as television and radio stations, may use World Malaria Day as the chance to promote or publicize awareness campaigns about malaria.
Public life
World Malaria Day is a global observance and not a public holiday.
Background
Malaria is a life-threatening disease caused by parasites that are transmitted to people through the bites of infected mosquitoes. About half of the worlds’ population is at risk of malaria, particularly those in lower-income countries. It infects more than 500 million people each year and kills more than one million people, according to WHO. However, Malaria is preventable and curable.
The World Health Assembly instituted World Malaria Day in May 2007. The purpose of the event is to give countries in affected regions the chance to learn from each other’s experiences and support one another’s efforts. World Malaria Day also enables new donors to join in a global partnership against malaria, and for research and academic institutions to reveal scientific advances to the public. The day also gives international partners, companies and foundations a chance to showcase their efforts and reflect on how to scale up what has worked.
22 April 2015 — Progress towards global vaccination targets for 2015 is far off-track with 1 in 5 children still missing out on routine life-saving immunizations that could avert 1.5 million deaths each year from preventable diseases. In the lead-up to World Immunization Week 2015 (24 -30 April), WHO is calling for renewed efforts to get progress back on course.
The World Immunization Week, which will be held from 24-30 April 2015, will signal a renewed global, regional, and national effort to accelerate action to increase awareness and demand for immunization by communities, and improve vaccination delivery services. This year’s campaign focuses on closing the immunization gap and reaching equity in immunization levels as outlined in the Global Vaccine Action Plan, which is a framework to prevent millions of deaths by 2020 through universal access to vaccines for people in all communities.
20 April 2015 – The four-year-long armed conflict in the Syrian Arab Republic has driven millions of families from their homes. WHO is working with public health authorities and partners to ensure Syrian children – whether still in their home country or living in camps across the border in Jordan – are immunized against polio. During World Immunization Week, hundreds of thousands of children in both countries will be immunized.
April 2015 — As World Immunization Week approaches, WHO reports on Kenya’s successes preventing deaths from pneumonia among babies and young children through national implementation of the PCV-10 vaccine. A mother in Kilifi tells the story of her daughter’s near-fatal episode of pneumonia and how her younger children were protected through immunization.
It’s been 25 years since the Space Shuttle Atlantis lofted the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit. We flash back to 1990, when astronomers debated the undertaking that changed the face of astronomy.
Jupiter and the first-quarter Moon star in the evening skies this weekend. Jupiter’s still got game even though it’s now far from opposition – be sure to catch its moons antics this week.
Walk in the astronauts’ footsteps as you explore the places they visited in the heyday of Apollo program. Use these helpful maps to start you on your way.
The stars of northern winter linger in the west — as celestial bears, a lion, and a snake climb in the east. Meanwhile, Jupiter and Venus sparkle overhead.
April 25th is Spring Astronomy Day, when hundreds of organizations worldwide host special family-oriented events to showcase the wonder and excitement of the night sky.
English Language Day aims to entertain and inform people about the history, culture and achievements associated with the language. The day often features book-reading events, English quizzes, poetry and literature exchanges, and other activities that promote the English language.
Public life
English Language Day is a global observance and not a public holiday.
About English Language Day
English is one of the two working languages of the UN Secretariat and one of the organization’s six official languages. English is often referred to as a “world language”, or the lingua franca (bridge language or common language used by speakers of different languages) of the modern era because it is widely spoken. The UN first celebrated English Language Day on April 23, 2010.
Did you know?
For a language that was used by only 3 tribes about 1500 years ago, English has official or special status in at least 75 countries with a total population of over two billion.
Ann
BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS 
