On the latest Orbital Path podcast, Michelle Thaller talks to Nicki Viall, a heliophysicist at Goddard Space Flight Center, who shares her excitement over the Parker Solar Probe — the spacecraft that will allow scientists to “touch” the Sun.Read more…
The launch of Sputnik 1, Earth’s first artificial satellite, paved the way for Moonwalking astronauts, robotic exploration of the planets, and space tourism.Read more…
Did you set the alarm so you didn’t miss the squeaky-tight conjunction of Venus and Mars Thursday morning? They’ll stay close through the weekend.Read more…
The United Nations’ (UN) World Teachers’ Day celebrates the role teachers play in providing quality education at all levels. This enables children and adults of all ages to learn to take part in and contribute to their local community and global society.
Various events are arranged in many countries around the world on or around October 5. These include celebrations to honor teachers in general or those who have made a special contribution to a particular community. The day may also be marked by conferences emphasizing the importance of teachers and learning, extra training sessions for teachers, recruitment drives for the teaching profession among university students or other suitably qualified professionals and events to increase the profile of teachers and the role they play in the media.
Trade unions or other professional organizations that represent teachers play an important role in organizing World Teachers’ Day events in many countries. These include:
The Australian Education Union.
The Canadian Teachers’ Federation.
The Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (Canada).
The All India Secondary Teachers’ Federation.
The Japan Teachers’ Union.
The Teachers Council (New Zealand).
The National Union of Teachers (United Kingdom).
The National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (United Kingdom).
The National Education Association (United States).
Moreover, international organizations such as TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) and Education International organize international, national and local events. In some areas posters are displayed and pupils and ex-pupils are encouraged to send e-cards or letters of appreciation to teachers who made a special or memorable contribution to their education.
Public Life
World Teachers’ Day is a global observance and not a public holiday.
Background
On October 5, 1966, the Special Intergovernmental Conference on the Status of Teachers in Paris, France, was closed and the “Recommendation concerning the Status of Teachers” was signed by representatives of UNESCO and International Labour Organization. On October 12, 1997, the 29th session of UNESCO’s General Conference was opened. During this conference, on November 11, 1997, the “Recommendation concerning the Status of Higher Education Teaching Personnel” was adopted.
On October 5, 1994, the first World Teachers’ Day was held. This event has been organized on the same date each year since then. However, local events may be on some other date close to October 5, so that they do not fall during fall (northern hemisphere) or spring (southern hemisphere) school vacations. In 2002, Canada Post issued a postage stamp to commemorate World Teachers’ Day.
The United Nations’ (UN) World Habitat Day is annually celebrated on the first Monday of October to reflect on the state of human settlements and people’s right to sufficient shelter. It also aims to remind people that they are responsible for the habitat of future next generations.
What Do People Do?
World Habitat Day is celebrated in many countries around the world, including in places such as Angola, China, India, Mexico, Poland, Uganda and the United States. Various activities around the world are organized to examine the problems of rapid urbanization and its impact on the environment and human poverty. Activities may include awards ceremonies, including the “Habitat Scroll of Honour” award.
Public Life
World Habitat Day is a global observance and not a public holiday.
Background
The UN’s World Habitat Day was first celebrated in 1986 with the theme “Shelter is My Right”. Nairobi was allocated as the host city for the observance that year. This annual event is held on the first Monday of October with a new theme each year. Previous themes included: “Shelter for the Homeless” (1987); “Our Neighbourhood” (1995); “Future Cities” (1997); “Safer Cities” (1998); “Women in Urban Governance” (2000); “Cities without Slums” (2001) and “Water and Sanitation for Cities” (2003).
An important highlight of the day is the “Habitat Scroll of Honour” award, which was launched by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UNHSP) in 1989. It is believed to be the world’s most prestigious human settlements award and aims to acknowledge initiatives that make outstanding contributions in areas such as shelter provision, highlighting the plight of the homeless, leadership in post conflict reconstruction, and developing and improving the human settlements and the quality of urban life.
Symbols
The UNHSP logo and slogan are often associated with World Habitat Day. The logo features The logo features a wreath consisting of crossed conventionalized branches of an olive tree encapsulating a circle. Within the circle is a figure of a person with his/her arms stretched out. The figure appears to be standing in front of a triangle. Underneath the image are the words “UN-HABITAT”. The slogan: “Shelter For All” is written in capital letters and sometimes appears next to the logo.
The United Nations’ (UN) International Day of Non-Violence is a global observance that promotes non-violence through education and public awareness. It is annually held on October 2 to coincide with renowned Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday.
Many people, governments, and non-government organizations around the world observe the International Day of Non-Violence through various events and activities such as:
News articles and broadcast announcements promoting the day.
Public lectures, seminars, discussions, and press conferences about non-violence.
Photo exhibitions highlighting issues, such as the dangers of the illicit trade of small arms.
Street awareness campaigns.
Light ceremonies promoting non-violence and peace.
Multi-faith prayer meetings.
The International Day of Non-Violence has strong connections with the works, beliefs, and methods of peace leader Mahatma Gandhi, who is known as India’s “Father of the Nation”.
Public Life
The International Day of Non-Violence is a global observance but it is not a public holiday.
Background
The principle of non-violence, also known as non-violent resistance, rejects the use of physical violence to achieve social or political change. Many groups throughout the world use this method in social justice campaigns. There are three main categories of non-violence action:
Protest and persuasion, including marches and vigils.
Non-cooperation.
Non-violent intervention, such as blockades and occupations.
The UN recognizes a philosophical connection between the human rights principles in its universal declaration and those that Mahatma Gandhi used. Gandhi was born in India on October 2, 1869. He is remembered today for his contributions towards India’s freedom and for sharing with the world a doctrine for dealing with injustice and disharmony. He taught people the philosophy of Ahimsa, which encourages the use of non-violence as a tool for the peaceful resolution of differences. India gained its freedom on August 15, 1947, through Gandhi’s efforts. He was assassinated on January 30, 1948.
The UN General Assembly came up with a resolution in 2007 to establish the International Day of Non-Violence. The day aimed to spread the message of non-violence, including through education and public awareness, around the world. The resolution reflected universal respect for Gandhi and his philosophy. October 2, which is Gandhi’s birthday, was allocated as the day’s date. The first International Day of Non-Violence was on October 2, 2007.
Symbols
The UN logo is often associated with marketing and promotional material for this event. It features a projection of a world map (less Antarctica) centered on the North Pole, inscribed in a wreath consisting of crossed conventionalized branches of the olive tree. The olive branches symbolize peace and the world map depicts the area of concern to the UN in achieving its main purpose, peace and security. The projection of the map extends to 60 degrees south latitude, and includes five concentric circles.
The United Nations’ (UN) International Day of Older Persons is celebrated annually on October 1 to recognize the contributions of older persons and to examine issues that affect their lives.
International Day of Older Persons is a special day for older persons or senior citizens all over the world. In many countries, politicians make speeches, particularly those responsible for government departments that focus on senior citizens, at this time of the year. Some radios, televisions or newspapers publish interviews with senior citizens on various issues such as achievements they made to create a better society.
Other activities surrounding this day include: displays of promotional material on the International Day of Older Persons in schools, tertiary institutions, office buildings and public notice boards; media announcements on the day and activities that promote older persons; and inter-generational cooperation on voluntary activities focused on the environment, health, education or community services.
The World Health Organization (WHO), which is the UN’s directing and coordinating authority for health related issues, and other groups have been actively involved in promoting public awareness and attention on the International Day of Older Persons. Discussions are centered on topics such as: ageing populations and the provision of adequate healthcare for aged persons; volunteer work; social care; and ways to be more inclusive of older persons in the workforce.
Public Life
The International Day of Older Persons is a global observance and not a public holiday.
Background
On December 14, 1990, the UN General Assembly made October 1 as the International Day of Older Persons, following up on initiatives such as the Vienna International Plan of Action on Ageing, which was adopted by the 1982 World Assembly on Ageing and endorsed later that year by the assembly. The International Day of Older Persons was observed for the first time throughout the world on October 1, 1991.
In 1991 the UN General Assembly adopted the United Nations Principles for Older Persons. In 2002 the second World Assembly on Ageing adopted the Madrid International Plan of Action on Ageing to respond to the opportunities and challenges of population ageing in the 21st century and to promote the development of a society for all ages.
Symbols
The WHO logo is often seen on promotional material for the International Day of Older Persons. The logo is often featured in the color white on a mid-blue background. It shows a stereographic projection of the Earth centered on the North Pole under a serpent coiled around a staff. Two ears of wheat “cradle” the image. The projection symbolizes the global nature of the organization, while the serpent and staff are known to symbolize medical help and knowledge. Images of older people from different cultures and backgrounds around the world have been also used in UN promotional tools for the International Day of Older Persons.
‘Lone wolf’ designation is a kind of white privilege; ACT for America’s Nazi problem; U.S. rejects UN resolution condemning death penalty for gays; and more.
The closure of two labor and delivery wards in D.C.’s poorest neighborhoods presents a challenge for communities with already alarmingly high maternal and infant mortality rates.
Poets, novelists and historians of color dominate the National Book Awards shortlist, holding more than half the finalist spots across four categories.
Two police officers werekilled by Stephen Craig Paddock when he opened fire on concert goers in Las Vegas, Nevada, and here it is four days after the shooting and no screams or bleats of “Blue Lives Matter!”
Now, I wonder why that is?
Every time a police officer is killed–a white police officer, that is—out comes the shrieks of “Blue Lives Matter!”
Why the silence?
Why no cries of blue lives matter?
What, these police officers’ lives did not matter?
The violence shown by Whites against the police is given a wide berth of mercy, but when it concerns a Black person, it is always since 1619, open season to destroy Black people.
The real dindu nuthins who are the first to cry when they have committed atrocities:
White resistors are never choked to death, tased, beaten, bloodied, shot to death when they resist cops.
The dehumanization of Black people is as old as American apple pie.
The normalization of White lives is upheld and kept in place.
So, NRA and Blue Lives matter……………where the hell are ya’?
The chickens have come home to roost.
Be prepared for more white police officers to be shot by whites, male and female, because of the leniency you have allowed to escalate through the centuries.
Nothing about how this sadistic and vicious piece of feces, Stephen Craig Paddock, who took the lives of so many people being just what he was: a gutless, cowardly, monstrous, murdering domestic terrorist.
If he was so sick and tired of his miserable useless life, why could he not go off into a vacant field and blow his brains out instead of taking so many people with him?
The claim that he was a “crazed gunman” and “psychologically impaired” is a crock of human shit.
Evidence?
Where is the barrage of psychiatric tests performed to assess his mental state of mind? Where are the records that he had any psychiatrist examine and pronounce him as insane? Where is the evidence of electro-convulsive therapy being performed on him? Where are the records of a pre-frontal-transorbital lobotomy being performed on him?
Convince me.
Prove it to me.
In earlier news reports, the claim that it was Isis that orchestrated the shooting and that Paddock had Isis ties.
Evidence, please.
Where are the e-mails, Youtube videos, and USPS snail-mail correspondence for this claim?
I await proof of Isis’ hand in this mass shooting.
Convince me.
Prove it to me.
This nation, this Whore of Babylon still quietly accepts the murderous rage of White men.
This place of terrorism and lies will always let abominations like Paddock off the hook.
“He did not mean it.” “He was out of his mind.”
Like hell.
This filth knew what he was doing. The plan of staying at the Mandalay Bay Hotel for 30 days; the amassing of numerous weapons to carry out his murder with malice aforethought, premeditated plan (does not sound insane to me) to shoot down like dogs in the street so many people. His actions speak volumes. He knew what he planned to do and there are no tears to be shed for this piece of garbage. According to police reports, Paddock fired from a room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay, which overlooked the Las Vegas Strip. At least 23 weapons were found in his hotel room, Clark County Assistant Sheriff Todd Fasulo said. Paddock’s home was also searched and police found even more weapons — 19 firearms, explosives and unidentified electronic devices as well as thousands of rounds of ammunition.
Does not sound like anyone who has been certified as having mental problems.
That is something that a person of sound mind does.
A person who is in complete control of their mental faculties.
No matter what kind of a bad gambling or bad accountant day they were having.
But, what the hey, let’s run with the insanity defense before all the evidence is accumulated.
Any time a White man destroys lives like this Paddock, out come the crocodile tears of “he was insane”, “he was crazy”, “he went berserk from out of the ordinary”, “he never showed any signs of aggression.”
But, he is a White man, and white men have been given carte blanc to murder, rape, lie, steal, kidnap, destroy, genocide, and mutilate so many lives all over the world. History proves that out.
Don’t believe me?
I suggest you pick up a history book that tells the truth.
Funny about these pathetic claims of white genocide by neo-nazis and alt-wrongs.
The only white genocide going on is that committed by whites like Paddock who murder their own kind.
I’d say Whites have more to fear from their own kind than anyone else on the planet.
Then there are the news sources playing up the humanity of this beast…this thing…this being—“former accountant, big-time gambler”—all irrelevant on the fact that he slaughtered those people and wounded over 500 people.
Oh, but that’s right………
…….murdering White terrorists such as Paddock get to keep their humanity intact even after taking so many white lives.
Let this have been a Black woman and her picture, her mother and father’s birth certificates, the last home-cooked meal she did, how many city jails, county jails, state prisons and federal prisons she has been incarcerated in for embezzlement, arson, DUI (oops, my bad; those are crimes that White people are more likely to commit. Hey don’t take my word for it. Consult the FBI crime statistics)—anyhoo, let it have been a Black woman and there would be no end to demonizing her.
As in the old days (for those of you who have trouble grasping a time frame), during Jane Crow day segregation (which, by the way, is still in effect in this so-called nation), that Black woman would have been beaten, tortured, burned, mutilated and raped before she was hung from a street telephone post—and then, her body would be shot to pieces by a fusilade of bullets from a lynch mob of fine, upstanding, God-fearing Christians.
But, this piece of unflushed down the toilet feces gets a pass because he is a White male who murdered.
Word up to all of you who call yourselves white people.
Ya’ better pull your heads out of your asses.
It ain’t Black people whom you should fear.
Better keep watch over your shoulder because the real nasty, perverted, worthless, hateful, mendacious, bloodthirsty, serial-killer, terrorists is not coming to a theater near you.
He is your own father, brother, son, husband, uncle, nephew, neighbor, boss, co-worker and all the walks of life where you can cross paths with him.
Stephen Craig Paddock.
A murdering terrorist.
May he burn and rot in Hell.
Oh, and one more parting note:
for all you voters who just could not wait to get Trump into office to harm Black people…………..
……………careful what you wished for. You got just what you wanted.
Novella Nelson as Harriet Tubman on the television series “You Are There” in the early 1970s.Credit CBS
Novella Nelson, a powerful and versatile actress whose long career included prominent roles in the hit Broadway musical “Purlie” in 1970 and the film “Antwone Fisher” more than 30 years later, died on Aug. 31 in Brooklyn. She was 78.
Her daughter, Alesa Blanchard Nelson, said the cause was cancer.
Over a half-century, Ms. Nelson performed in classical and contemporary works in New York and at regional theaters around the country. She was a stage director, a consultant to the impresario Joseph Papp at the Public Theater and a cabaret singer before she began to appear on television and in movies.
But her face — and the authority that she brought to her myriad roles — was usually more familiar than her name.
“Her face,” the New York Times drama critic Walter Kerr once wrote, “is not so much a countenance as a splendor of lines.”
For all her achievements, Ms. Nelson never became famous. But, her daughter said, she was comfortable with her relative anonymity.
“I can’t pin me down, and that doesn’t worry me,” she told The Washington Post soon after the release of Paul Mazursky’s “An Unmarried Woman” (1978), in which she had one of her earliest movie roles. “Everyone sees different parts of me. But like the character in the movie, I am a free spirit. She has a grip on things and so do I.”
Novella Nelson singing at a nightclub in 1968.
She added, “Ask me in another five months who I am.”
Ms. Nelson’s stage work suggested a desire never to be typecast. She played Vanity, one of seven “ungrateful abstractions,” including Intellect and Sensuality, in “Horseman, Pass By,” a musical based on William Butler Yeats’s poetry; Lena in the South African playwright Athol Fugard’s “Boesman and Lena,” about a couple during the apartheid era; Clytemnestra, the queen of Greek legend, in Sophocles’ “Electra,” and Aunt Ester, an ancient mystic, in “Gem of the Ocean,” the first in August Wilson’s 10-play cycle set in Pittsburgh that dramatizes the African-American experience in the 20th century.
In her review of the Hartford Stage production of “Gem of the Ocean” in 2011, Sylviane Gold wrote in The Times that Ms. Nelson played Ester “with a magnificent combination of regal dignity and maternal tenderness.”
Novella Christine Nelson was born in Brooklyn on Dec. 17, 1938. Her father, James, was a taxi driver and a pastor. Her mother, the former Evelyn Hines, was an executive secretary at Women’s Wear Daily.
By her sophomore year at Brooklyn College, Ms. Nelson aspired to be a chemist and was planning to major in biochemistry. “She was a nerd,” her daughter said.
But she took a theater course, which transformed her; after she played Berenice, the housekeeper, in Carson McCullers’s “The Member of the Wedding,” she was overcome with excitement.
“It was a feeling I never had before, and its only happened three or four other times since,” she told The Hartford Courant in 2011. “When I came off the stage, someone had to hold me for a second because it was so extraordinary.”
Her trajectory had been permanently altered. She went on to play Madame Tango, the matron of a bordello, in an Off Broadway production of the Truman Capote-Harold Arlen musical “House of Flowers,” and was Pearl Bailey’s understudy in the lead role of “Hello, Dolly!” on Broadway before she was cast in “Purlie,” the musical version of Ossie Davis’s play “Purlie Victorious.”
Ms. Nelson returned to Broadway in “Caesar and Cleopatra” (with Rex Harrison and Elizabeth Ashley) in 1977 and in “The Little Foxes” (with Elizabeth Taylor) in 1981. She was also in the National Actors Theater production of “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” (with Al Pacino) in 2002. And on television, among her many roles, she played Harriet Tubman in an early 1970s episode of “You Are There,” the CBS News historical series.
She began to sing partly to earn money between acting jobs, after the manager of a nightclub in Manhattan overheard her say that she could perform better than the singer onstage.
“If you think you can do better, get up there and sing,” she recalled the manager telling her. “And because I sang all my life in church, I did, and he hired me.”
She had an emotional and provocative style of singing blues, gospel and pop, and was equally at ease with the songs of Bessie Smith and Jacques Brel.
Interviewed by The Times between sets at the Village Vanguard in 1968, she said: “I felt I could express my commitment to my blackness, to my recognition of who I am, much better as a singer than an actress. But I don’t think of myself as a rebel. I preach love — a coming together.”
She recorded only one album, called simply “Novella Nelson” and released in 1970, and eventually cut back on her singing to focus on her acting.
Her daughter is her only survivor. Ms. Nelson’s marriage to George Blanchard ended in divorce.
Ms. Nelson poked fun at her public renown in a 2010 episode of the sitcom “30 Rock,” in which she played herself. In the episode she was cast to play the mother of Tracy Jordan, Tracy Morgan’s character, on a Mother’s Day show, because his real mother could not be found.
“Maybe you wanted someone more high-profile, but I am what you’ve got,” she told him. “So, Tracy, you’d better watch yourself or you may wind up with no mother at all.”
“Fine,” he replied. “I’d rather be up on that stage all alone than to be with someone whose résumé has ‘black judge’ on it nine times.”
Bernie Casey portrayed the paralyzed former N.B.A. player Maurice Stokes in the 1973 movie “Maurie.”Credit National General Pictures
Bernie Casey, an accomplished National Football League receiver who successfully painted and acted in dozens of films, including “Revenge of the Nerds,” “Brian’s Song” and “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka,” died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 78.
His friend Wren T. Brown said the cause was complications of a stroke.
A fast 6-foot-4 receiver, Mr. Casey had been a football and track star at Bowling Green State University in Ohio when he signed with the San Francisco 49ers in 1961. Over eight seasons he was a model of consistency, catching at least 50 passes per season five times and finishing in the top 10 among N.F.L. receivers four times. He was chosen for the Pro Bowl in 1967, before he moved on to the Los Angeles Rams.
In the Rams’ next-to-last regular-season game in 1967, Mr. Casey caught the game-winning touchdown with 34 seconds left to lead them to a 27-24 win over the Green Bay Packers. The win ensured that the Rams would play the Baltimore Colts for the Coastal Division. The Rams won easily, but lost the conference championship to the Packers. Mr. Casey scored the Rams’ only touchdown.
By then, he was charting what he would do after he finished playing football. Mr. Casey, who had been painting since high school, told Life magazine in 1964, “I think of myself as an artist who plays football, not as a ball player who paints.”
Mr. Casey (30) catching a touchdown pass for the San Francisco 49ers in a loss to the Detroit Lions in 1964.Credit Associated Press
While he was still motivated to excel in football, he said, his greater goal was to improve as a painter. He had already had two one-man shows.
“I think the real Bernie Casey is coming through,” he told Life. “There are all sorts of signs. Just the other day, I was walking through a gallery and a man walked up and said, ‘Are you Bernard Casey, the artist?’ ”
Mr. Casey balanced painting abstract oils and fantasy landscapes with acting once he stopped playing football. He retired after the 1968 season, three years after Jim Brown, the N.F.L.’s biggest star, abrupty ended his career with the Cleveland Browns and began to act. One of Mr. Casey’s first roles was in “tick … tick … tick …,” a 1970 thriller with Mr. Brown.
He went on to play J. C. Caroline, a Chicago Bears teammate of the dying Brian Piccolo, in the television movie “Brian’s Song” (1971); a C.I.A. agent working with Sean Connery in the James Bond film “Never Say Never Again” (1983); and an aging action hero in “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka” (1989), a parody of the blaxploitation genre that reunited him with Mr. Brown.
Mr. Casey also appeared in three of the “Revenge of the Nerds” movies, a series of comedies about collegiate misfits fighting a jock fraternity. He played U. N. Jefferson, president of the Lambda Lambda Lambda fraternity.
Mr. Casey in 1983 as the C.I.A. agent Felix Leiter in the James Bond film “Never Say Never Again.”Credit Warner Brothers, via Photofest
In 1973, he portrayed the paralyzed former National Basketball Association player Maurice Stokes in the film “Maurie.” Writing in The New York Times, the columnist Dave Anderson praised Mr. Casey for capturing the agonizing effort required by Mr. Stokes to lift a spoon and recalled a conversation he had with Mr. Casey late in his football career.
“Just because I’m a football player,” he told Mr. Anderson, “doesn’t mean I can’t be something else at the same time. Most of us live on a small portion of our capacity. I don’t want to let the limitation of others limit me.”
Bernard Terry Casey was born on June 8, 1939, in Wyco, W. Va. His father, Frank, was a coal miner. His mother was the former Flossie Coleman.
In addition to playing on the Bowling Green football team, which was voted the small college champion in 1959, Mr. Casey competed in the high hurdles and finished sixth at the 1960 Olympic trials, short of making the team. He earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s of fine arts from Bowling Green.
He was drafted by the 49ers, the New York Titans (who became the Jets) of the American Football League and the Montreal Alouettes of the Canadian Football League. He chose the 49ers because, he said, San Francisco would advance his artistic dreams. He was traded in 1967 to the Atlanta Falcons, which quickly sent him to the Rams.
“From Up Til Down,” an acrylic painting by Bernie Casey.Credit Thelma Harris Art Gallery
Collectors of his paintings have included Sidney Poitier, Burt Reynolds and Maya Angelou, according to the Thelma Harris Art Gallery in Oakland, which had a major show of Mr. Casey’s paintings in 2003.
Mr. Casey also published a few books of poetry, including “Look at the People” (1969) and “Where Is the Revolution … and Other Poems” (1973).
He is survived by his sister, Frankie Murray. His marriage to Paula Campbell ended in divorce. They had no children.
In 1997, Mr. Casey directed, wrote and produced the movie “The Dinner,” which featured three African-American men talking about slavery, white superiority, black crime and other racial subjects around a dinner table. It was a departure from the action films and comedies he was known for. But it was close to his heart and based on conversations with his friends. None of the characters had names; they were Good Brother (Mr. Casey), Young Brother (Wren Brown) and Brother Man (Doug Johnson).
“Most people don’t know us, as African-Americans,” Mr. Casey said at the time, “even those of us who are greatly celebrated. We are so expendable, we have no history in the context of the nation.”
Correction: September 23, 2017 An obituary on Friday about the football player, actor and painter Bernie Casey misstated the month of his birth. He was born on June 8, 1939 — not on Sept. 8
Jake LaMotta, left, in a bout against Sugar Ray Robinson on Feb. 23, 1945 at Madison Square Garden in New York. Robinson won the fight on a decision.Credit Matty Zimmerman/Associated Press
Jake LaMotta, boxing’s “Raging Bull,” who brawled his way to the middleweight boxing championship in a life of unbridled fury — within the ring and outside it — that became the subject of an acclaimed film, died on Tuesday in Aventura, Fla., near Miami. He was 95.
His longtime fiancée, Denise Baker, said he died of pneumonia at Palm Garden of Aventura, a nursing Home and rehabilitation facility, where he had been under hospice care.
A “good-for-nothing bum kid” with a terrible temper, as he later described himself, LaMotta learned to box in an upstate New York reformatory, where he had been sent for attempted burglary. Having gone undefeated as an amateur after his release, he turned pro in 1941 and unleashed his enmity on dozens of ring opponents.
He ultimately became a pop culture symbol of rage when the director Martin Scorsese told his story in his 1980 film “Raging Bull,” based on LaMotta’s 1970 memoir of the same title, written with Joseph Carter and Peter Savage. Robert De Niro won an Academy Award for his portrayal of LaMotta, and the film was nominated in six categories, including best picture.
LaMotta was able to absorb a flurry of punches only to unload a more brutal barrage on an opponent. He would, as he wrote in his memoir, “charge out of the corner, punch, punch, punch, never give up, take all the punishment the other guy could hand out but stay in there, slug and slug and slug.”
LaMotta with his wife, Vikki, arriving at Penn Station in New York from Detroit, where he had defeated Marcel Cerdan to capture the world middleweight title in June 1949.Credit Associated Press
Ray Arcel, one of boxing’s most renowned trainers, said of LaMotta, “When he was in the ring, it was like he was in a cage fighting for his life.”
Best remembered for his six bouts with Sugar Ray Robinson, LaMotta won 83 fights (30 by knockouts) and lost 19 (including a “fix” to which he belatedly confessed, telling a congressional panel that he had been promised that if he lost that fight he would get a title shot). He also fought four draws. He captured the middleweight championship in June 1949, stopping the titleholder, Marcel Cerdan, at Briggs Stadium in Detroit, and was knocked down only once in his 106 fights.
Mr. Scorsese made his film long after LaMotta had squandered his money — he said he made $1 million in the ring — and had gone through a series of stormy marriages, been sent to prison once more and ballooned into obesity.
“I would think that Jake thinks it’s a movie about himself,” Mr. Scorsese told The New York Times shortly after “Raging Bull” was released. “But those who think it’s a boxing picture would be out of their minds. It’s brutal, sure, but it’s a brutality that could take place not only in the boxing ring but in the bedroom or in an office. Jake is an elemental man.”
LaMotta boxed more than a thousand rounds with Mr. De Niro, tutoring him for a role that brought him the Oscar for best actor. Cathy Moriarty, in her professional acting debut, played LaMotta’s second wife, Vikki, a beautiful blonde who endured a chaotic marriage, and was nominated for a supporting-actress Oscar.
LaMotta had mixed feelings about the film. “I kind of look bad in it,” he told The Times. “Then I realized it was true. That’s the way it was. I was a no-good bastard. It’s not the way I am now, but the way I was then.”
A poster for the 1980 film “Raging Bull,” starring Robert De Niro as Jake LaMotta.Credit Movie Poster Image Art, via Getty Images
Giacobbe LaMotta was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan on July 10, 1922, one of five children. He recalled that his father, a Sicilian immigrant who peddled fruits and vegetables, frequently beat his wife, a daughter of Italian immigrants, and their children.
The family moved to Philadelphia and then to the Bronx, where they lived in a rat-infested tenement. LaMotta attacked bullying schoolmates with an ice pick, and he beat a neighborhood bookie into unconsciousness with a lead pipe while robbing him.
He emerged as a leading middleweight in the early 1940s, having been rejected from World War II military service because a childhood mastoid operation had affected his hearing.
In February 1943, he dealt Robinson the first loss of his career in Robinson’s 41st fight, winning a 10-round decision after knocking him through the ropes. Robinson won their other five fights, but LaMotta also defeated prominent fighters like Fritzie Zivic, Tony Janiro and Bob Satterfield.
Al Silvani, a trainer for LaMotta, felt he was most dangerous when seemingly beaten. As Silvani recalled in “Corner Men,” by Ronald K. Fried (1993), LaMotta would “lay against the ropes playing possum and all at once — and this no exaggeration — he’d throw seven, eight, nine, ten left hooks at you.”
LaMotta had been favored to defeat Billy Fox of Philadelphia in a light-heavyweight bout in November 1947, but the odds swung 3-1 in Fox’s favor shortly before the fight, evidently because of an infusion of organized crime money from Philadelphia. LaMotta was pummeled by Fox, and the bout was stopped in the fourth round.
Jake LaMotta, right, training in 1949.Credit The New York Times
The New York State Athletic Commission looked into suspicions that LaMotta had deliberately lost the fight, but he claimed he had been impaired by a ruptured spleen that he incurred in training. He got away with a $1,000 fine and a seven-month suspension for hiding an injury.
But in 1960, when the Senate Antitrust and Monopoly subcommittee held hearings on organized crime’s influence in boxing, LaMotta admitted that he had agreed to lose the Fox fight in return for gaining a long-sought shot at the middleweight crown. In a deposition, he said that one of the men who arranged the fix was Blinky Palermo, Fox’s manager and the reputed numbers kingpin of Philadelphia.
LaMotta had received his opportunity 17 months after the Fox bout, and he stopped Cerdan on a 10th-round technical knockout to become middleweight champion. Cerdan, a Frenchman, was en route to the United States for a return fight when he was killed in a plane crash.
LaMotta successfully defended his title twice, then lost it to Robinson when their bout, at Chicago Stadium on Feb. 14, 1951, was stopped in the 13th round. LaMotta was a bloody mess but had never hit the canvas. The fight became known as the second Valentine’s Day Massacre, an allusion to the storied 1929 gangland killings in Chicago.
1951-2-14 Jake LaMotta vs Ray Robinson VIVideo by BoxNights
LaMotta’s career slid downhill after he lost the title, and on Dec. 31, 1952, following a six-month layoff, he was knocked down for the only time in his career, losing to Danny Nardico in a light-heavyweight fight. He retired, then came back in 1954 for a few bouts before quitting for good.
He was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1990.
LaMotta’s perpetual rage led him to beat his first wife, Ida. He married again, in 1946 — his new wife, Vikki, was a teenager — but that marriage, too, descended into turmoil amid LaMotta’s drinking and womanizing. She filed for divorce in 1956. He was married six times.
LaMotta shadow-boxing in a performance of “The Lady and the Champ,” an Off Broadway show about his life in 2012.Credit Ruby Washington/The New York Times.
In 1957, while operating a nightclub and bar in Miami Beach, LaMotta was convicted of encouraging a minor to be a prostitute. He spent six months in jail and worked on a road gang.
Encouraged to try show business by Rocky Graziano, also a former middleweight champion, who had turned to acting and had been his friend since their time together in reform school, LaMotta later worked as a stand-up comic and an actor. He appeared as a bartender in the Paul Newman film “The Hustler” (1961) and played the mobster Big Jule in a 1965 production of the musical “Guys and Dolls” at the City Center in Manhattan.
LaMotta appeared with Ms. Baker in a revue-style Off Broadway production, “The Lady and the Champ,” which ran for two weeks in 2012.
A second movie about his life, “LaMotta: The Bronx Bull,” was released in 2015, with William Forsythe portraying LaMotta. It had no connection to the film “Raging Bull.”
In addition to Ms. Baker, LaMotta is survived by his daughters, Jacklyn O’Neill, Christie LaMotta, Elisa LaMotta and Mia Day; Ms. Baker’s daughters, Meggen Connolley and Natalia Baker; his brothers, Joe and Al; his sisters, Maria Hawfield and Anne Ramaglia; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. His sons, Jack and Joseph, died seven months apart in 1998, Jack from cancer and Joseph in a plane crash.
LaMotta’s toughness was in full display in his battles with Sugar Ray Robinson, whom many consider the finest pound-for-pound boxer in history. Robinson had seemingly exhausted LaMotta, known then as the Bronx Bull, in their second bout, only to learn otherwise.
“I had him along the ropes,” Robinson remembered in his autobiography, “Sugar Ray” (1969), written with Dave Anderson, a sports columnist for The Times. “He had his head down and I was really measuring him. His head popped up and he let go a left hook that almost tore through my stomach. It hurt so much, I had tears in my eyes, like a little kid. I got the decision, but I learned that Jake LaMotta was some animal.”
Correction: September 20, 2017 An earlier version of a picture caption with this obituary, using information from The Associated Press, misidentified the New York City railroad station at which LaMotta and his wife, Vikki, are shown arriving from Detroit after he won the middleweight title. It was Penn Station, not Grand Central Terminal.
Correction: September 20, 2017 An earlier version of this obituary, using information from a spokesman, misidentified the city where LaMotta died. it is Aventura, Fla., not Miami.
Correction: September 22, 2017 An obituary on Thursday about the boxer Jake LaMotta misspelled part of the name of the character he played in a 1965 production of “Guys and Dolls.” The character is Big Jule, not Big Julie.
Charles Owens poses with one of his long putters on a golf course in Tampa, Fla., in 2012.Credit Craig Litten for The New York Times
If Charles Owens was going to jump-start a late-blooming golf career, he had to fix his putting. He was 51 and playing on the Senior PGA Tour. He had bad legs and a painful back. And he had the yips — involuntary hand and arm movements that caused him to yank his putts one way or the other.
“I had the yips so bad,” he told Golf Digest, “that I would freeze up on a two-footer.”
Weary of the many putters that had failed him, Owens drew up plans for an extra-long one and gave them to a machinist friend. On Christmas Day 1983, at a golf course near his home in Tampa, Fla., Owens tested the machinist’s handiwork, a 52-inch putter. He held it with his left hand against his chest; his right hand clasped it about halfway down the shaft. Within 15 minutes, he knew his new putter, christened Slim Jim, would change his game.
With the putter in his bag, he won two tournaments in 1986 and more money than he had ever had — a satisfying reward for an African-American golfer who had grown up poor in segregated Winter Haven, Fla., developed a passion for a game that was reserved mostly for whites and carved his first clubs out of tree limbs.
“I found the key to the lock,” Owens told People magazine in 1986. “With this putter, you can’t jerk the ball when you’re nervous. It might look funny, but missing putts can make a brave man cry. I just had to find my own way.”
Owens, who died at 85 on Sept. 7 in Winter Haven from complications of Alzheimer’s disease, would live to see other golfers, like Adam Scott and Rocco Mediate, use long putters, and for golf’s rule-making bodies to later bar golfers from anchoring them against their bodies while putting.
Owens was not as well known as the few African-American golfers who had won on the PGA Tour, among them Lee Elder, Charlie Sifford and Calvin Peete. He had victories on the low-profile circuit of mostly black tournaments organized by the United Golf Association, but found little success during his short time on the PGA Tour.
It was the Senior PGA Tour, however — now called the PGA Tour Champions — that brought him a second chance at glory, as it has for many other professional golfers 50 or older. It allowed him to compete against the likes of Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, Chi Chi Rodriguez and Bruce Crampton.
Charles Owens using one of his long putters.Credit Craig Litten for The New York Times
They, of course, did not have Owens’s physical limitations. His stiff left knee, damaged during a botched jump as a stateside Army paratrooper in the early 1950s, had been fused and caused him to limp badly. His right knee was not much better, having been operated on several times. His lower back was chronically arthritic. Eye inflammations caused occasional blindness.
But in 1985, Owens’s revived game was showing positive results. He finished in the top 10 in eight of the 16 Senior PGA tournaments he entered and won $78,158, ranking him 18th on the tour.
The next season was his career breakthrough. Victories at the Treasure Coast Classic and the Del E. Webb Senior PGA Tour helped carry him to earnings of $207,813 (about $463,000 in today’s money).
“I’ve got a new life now,” he told The New York Times in July 1986. “But for a while, I thought it might never happen. Two years ago, my wife, Judy, and I had seven credit cards, each with a $2,000 limit. We lived on those cards.”
At a tournament that year, Billy Casper, one of the tour’s legends, smiled as he saw whose name had replaced his on the leader board, The Washington Post reported.
“Why, it’s Charlie Owens!” Casper said excitedly. “Isn’t that wonderful?”
Charles Lee Owens was born in Winter Haven on Feb. 22, 1932. His father, Fred Sr., was the greenskeeper at a municipal golf course; his mother, the former Donnie Wright, was a homemaker.
Charles, one of nine children, grew fascinated by golf, even though the course where his father worked would allow blacks only to caddie, not play. He carved his own crude clubs out of the branches of Australian pine trees and whacked bottle caps instead of dimpled balls.
As he got older, he would sneak onto the course to play with real clubs. And as his skills became evident, he told Sports Illustrated in 1986, some club members let him borrow their clubs to play the course on caddie days.
His self-taught game had one obvious quirk: He gripped clubs crosshanded. But he became too proficient to consider changing.
As a young man Owens believed he could be one of golf’s greatest players if he had the chance to play against the best. But he also recognized that golf at the time was inhospitable to blacks.
“Just playing golf takes a whole lot of heart and suffering,” he told Sports Illustrated. “When you threw in the segregation, I felt this was too much for me.”
Instead, he entered the historically black Florida A & M College (now University) in Tallahassee and played wide receiver for its football team. At 6-foot-3 and about 200 pounds, he had the physique for the sport.
In his junior year, he was drafted by the Army and became a paratrooper. While on maneuvers once, with the 82nd Airborne Division, he made a night jump, but the pilot let the platoon out in the wrong area. He landed in a tree, his left knee hitting a stump as he fell to the ground.
Owens had fractured his left femur in the accident — although the injury was originally misdiagnosed as pulled muscles — and for more than a decade he would live almost entirely without golf.
He moved to New York City, where he sold cars and sporting goods, and underwent operations, which did not relieve the knee pain. But while recuperating from knee fusion surgery, he read a golf magazine and began to wonder if he could play again, albeit on a stiff left leg nearly two inches shorter than his right one.
Practicing first on a golf course in Brooklyn, he found his skills quickly returning. He began playing — and then winning — on the predominantly black United Golf Association tour and qualified for the PGA Tour in 1970. But finding little tour success — he won only $16,515 while playing only occasionally — he took a job as head pro at Rogers Park, a golf course in Tampa.
In a few years he became eligible for the Senior PGA Tour and began resuscitating his career.
“Charlie was amazing,” Jim Colbert, a senior tour player, told The Times in 1998. “I marveled at him. He didn’t hit a lot of what you’d call pretty golf shots. He did it with things you couldn’t see — heart and guts.”
Owens is survived by eight daughters, Charlena Owens Green, who confirmed his death, Wanda, Annette and Debbie Owens, Pamela Robinson, Jennifer Freeman, Glenda Hurst and Pamela Baker; three sons, Michael, Tony and DeShea; three sisters, Clora DuBose, Betty Williford and JoAnn Tyler; 18 grandchildren; and 39 great-grandchildren.
His marriages to Everlena King, Janice Williams-Lane, Rosa Mae Grimes and Judy Martin ended in divorce.
Owens was halfway through the 1987 season and preparing to play in the United States Senior Open in Fairfield, Conn., when he faced a formidable physical challenge: Unlike the Senior PGA Tour, in which players could use golf carts, the United States Golf Association prohibited their use at the Open.
Owens unsuccessfully protested the policy and played the first nine holes of the first round on crutches before he withdrew.
“When they made the rules for golf, you had no choice but to walk,” he told The Times. “But golf has been modernized. I wouldn’t go close to a golf cart if I was healthy, but that’s the way it had to be for me.”
HARRY DEAN STANTON, CHARACTER ACTOR WHO BECAME A STAR
Harry Dean Stanton in the 1984 movie “Repo Man.”Credit Universal Pictures, via Photofest
Harry Dean Stanton, the gaunt, hollow-eyed, scene-stealing character actor who broke out of obscurity in his late 50s in two starring movie roles and capped his career with an acclaimed characterization as a corrupt polygamist on the HBO series “Big Love,” died on Friday in Los Angeles. He was 91.
His death, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, was confirmed by his agent, John S. Kelly.
Mr. Stanton spent two decades typecast in Hollywood as cowboys and villains before his unusual talents began to attract notice on the strength of his performances in the movies “Straight Time” (1978); “Alien,” “Wise Blood” and “The Rose” (all 1979); and “Escape From New York” (1981).
In those roles — as a former criminal bored in the law-abiding world, a 22nd-century space traveler, a street preacher pretending to be blind, a devastatingly cruel country-music star and a crazed demolitions expert — his look and his down-home voice were the same, but his characters were distinct and memorable.
Mr. Stanton at the premiere of HBO’s “Big Love” in Hollywood in 2006. He starred as a corrupt polygamist.Credit Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times in 1978 that Mr. Stanton’s “mysterious gift” was “to be able to make everything he does seem immediately authentic.” The critic Roger Ebert once wrote that Mr. Stanton was one of two character actors (the other was M. Emmet Walsh) whose presence in a movie guaranteed that it could not be “altogether bad.”
But he remained largely unknown to the general public until 1984, when the seemingly impossible, or at least the unexpected, happened: Mr. Stanton, the quintessential supporting player, became a leading man.
That year he starred as a wandering amnesiac reunited with his family in Wim Wenders’s “Paris, Texas,” which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and as a fast-talking automobile thief training Emilio Estevez in the ways of his world in Alex Cox’s cult comedy “Repo Man.”
If there was any remaining doubt about his newly attained star status, it was eliminated in 1986 when he was invited to host “Saturday Night Live.”
Mr. Stanton, left, and the actress Nastassja Kinski at the 37th Cannes Film Festival for a screening of “Paris, Texas” in 1984. At right is Wim Wenders, who directed it.Credit Michel Lipchitz/Associated Press
Mr. Stanton was never anonymous again, although he continued to make his contributions almost entirely in supporting roles. He played Molly Ringwald’s underemployed father in the teenage romance “Pretty in Pink” (1986), the apostle Paul in Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988), a private eye in David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart” (1990), a judge in Terry Gilliam’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” (1998), the hero’s ailing brother in Mr. Lynch’s “The Straight Story” (1999), a veteran inmate cheerfully testing the electrocution equipment in “The Green Mile” (1999) and Charlie Sheen’s father in “The Big Bounce” (2004).
Mr. Stanton was cast in one of his best-known roles when he was almost 80: that of Roman Grant, a self-proclaimed prophet with 14 wives, on “Big Love,” HBO’s acclaimed series about the everyday lives of polygamists. After his character was killed in the Season 3 finale in 2009, he joked that the show had generated more response than anything else he had done, “except for a couple hundred other movies.”
Mr. Stanton had an impressive singing voice and toured with a male chorus early in his career. He first sang on screen in “Cool Hand Luke” (1967), doing three numbers, including the hymn “Just a Closer Walk With Thee.” He later formed the Harry Dean Stanton Band, which played rock, blues, jazz and Tex-Mex numbers in Los Angeles nightclubs and on tour.
In 2014 he released an album, “Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction,” consisting of songs he sang on the soundtrack of a documentary about him by the same name.
Mr. Stanton in 2012 at the world premiere of the film “Marvel’s the Avengers” in Hollywood.Credit Danny Moloshok/Reuters
Harry Dean Stanton was born in West Irvine, Ky., a small town southeast of Lexington, on July 14, 1926, the son of Sheridan Stanton, a tobacco farmer who also worked as a barber, and the former Ersel Moberly, a cook.
After serving in the Navy in the Pacific during World War II, he attended the University of Kentucky, where he became interested in drama. Dropping out of college after three years, he moved to Los Angeles and studied acting at the Pasadena Playhouse.
Mr. Stanton — who was often billed as Dean Stanton early in his career to avoid confusion with another character actor, Harry Stanton — made his first television appearance in 1954 in an episode of “Inner Sanctum,” a syndicated mystery and suspense anthology series. His film debut was in “Tomahawk Trail,” a 1957 western starring Chuck Connors, and for the first two decades of his career westerns were his specialty.
Among the numerous TV westerns on which he was seen were “Rawhide,” “Bonanza” and “The Big Valley.” He was also on eight episodes of “Gunsmoke,” playing a different character in each. His last western film was Arthur Penn’s unorthodox “The Missouri Breaks” (1976), starring Marlon Brando and Mr. Stanton’s onetime roommate Jack Nicholson.
Mr. Stanton performing in Los Angeles in 2006. He was an accomplished singer who formed his own band, which played rock, blues, jazz and Tex-Mex numbers in nightclubs and on tour.Credit Jae C. Hong/Associated Press
Mr. Stanton remained busy to the end. He had small roles in the 2012 movies “The Avengers” and “Seven Psychopaths” and was in episodes of the HBO series “Getting On” in 2013 and 2014. This year, he appeared in a few episodes of “Twin Peaks: The Return” and starred in the feature film “Lucky,” scheduled for release this month. He plays a hard-bitten 90-year-old atheist in the movie, which also stars Mr. Lynch.
Mr. Stanton drew unwanted headlines in 1996 after gunmen broke into his Hollywood home on Mulholland Drive, struck him and tied him up before ransacking the house, stealing cash and electronics and escaping in his Lexus. Two men were captured in a police chase and sentenced to prison.
There was no immediate information on his survivors.
Even as his profile rose, Mr. Stanton expressed some disappointment in his career. “It’s just so frustrating when you’re in a supporting role because you only get to express a part of yourself,” he said in a 1986 interview with The Los Angeles Times.
But he was matter-of-fact about his gift. That same year he told The New York Times Magazine: “I know I’ve got the ability to bring a sense of menace to the screen. I have that specific competence, and it’s generally kept me working.”
He then summed up his adult life. “To put it mildly,” he said, “I was just a very late bloomer.”
Ann
BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS 