Departed During 2023

[FD2]

Apparently, when Helo caught their eye she was just seventeen, in the words of the Beatles...

[OneHungLow]

Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, the Harvard-educated mathematician who retreated to a dingy shack in the Montana wilderness and ran a 17-year bombing campaign that killed three people and injured 23 others, died on Saturday. He was 81.

Branded the “Unabomber” by the FBI, Kaczynski died at the federal prison medical center in Butner, North Carolina, Kristie Breshears, a spokesperson for the federal Bureau of Prisons, told the Associated Press. He was found unresponsive in his cell early on Saturday morning and was pronounced dead around 8am, she said. A cause of death was not immediately known.

Before his transfer to the prison medical facility, he had been held in the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, since May 1998, when he was sentenced to four life sentences plus 30 years for a campaign of terror that set universities nationwide on edge. He admitted committing 16 bombings from 1978 and 1995, permanently maiming several of his victims.

Years before the September 11 attacks and the anthrax mailing, the Unabomber’s deadly homemade bombs changed the way Americans mailed packages and boarded airplanes, even virtually shutting down air travel on the west coast in July 1995.

He forced the Washington Post, in conjunction with the New York Times, to make the agonizing decision in September 1995 to publish his 35,000-word manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, which claimed modern society and technology was leading to a sense of powerlessness and alienation.

But it led to his undoing. Kaczynski’s brother David and David’s wife, Linda Patrik, recognized the treatise’s tone and tipped off the FBI, which had been searching for the “Unabomber” for years in nation’s longest, costliest manhunt.

Authorities in April 1996 found him in a 10-by-14ft (3-by-4-meter) plywood and tarpaper cabin outside Lincoln, Montana, that was filled with journals, a coded diary, explosive ingredients and two completed bombs.

But once revealed as a wild-eyed hermit with long hair and beard who weathered Montana winters in a one-room shack, Kaczynski struck many as more of a pathetic loner than romantic antihero.

Even in his own journals, Kaczynski came across as not a committed revolutionary, but a vengeful hermit driven by petty grievances.

“I certainly don’t claim to be an altruist or to be acting for the ‘good’ (whatever that is) of the human race,” he wrote on 6 April 1971. “I act merely from a desire for revenge.”

Kaczynski hated the idea of being viewed as mentally ill and when his lawyers attempted to present an insanity defense, he tried to fire them. When that failed, he tried to hang himself with his underwear.

Kaczynski eventually pleaded guilty rather than let his defense team proceed with an insanity defense.

“I’m confident that I’m sane,” Kaczynski told Time magazine in 1999. “I don’t get delusions and so forth.”

Ted Kaczynski was born on 22 May 1942, in Chicago, the son of second-generation Polish Catholics – a sausage-maker and a homemaker. He played the trombone in the school band, collected coins and skipped the sixth and 11th grades.

Kaczynski had skipped two grades to attend Harvard at age 16 and had published papers in prestigious mathematics journals. His explosives were carefully tested and came in meticulously handcrafted wooden boxes sanded to remove possible fingerprints. Later bombs bore the signature “FC” for “Freedom Club”.

The FBI called him the “Unabomber” because his early targets seemed to be universities and airlines. An altitude-triggered bomb he mailed in 1979 went off as planned onboard an American Airlines flight; a dozen people onboard suffered from smoke inhalation.

Kaczynski killed computer rental store owner Hugh Scrutton, advertising executive Thomas Mosser and timber industry lobbyist Gilbert Murray. California geneticist Charles Epstein and Yale University computer expert David Gelernter were maimed by bombs two days apart in June 1993.

Mosser was killed in his North Caldwell, New Jersey, home on 10 December 1994, a day he was supposed to be picking out a Christmas tree with his family. His wife, Susan, found him grievously wounded by a barrage of razor blades, pipes and nails.

“He was moaning very softly,” she said at Kaczynski’s 1998 sentencing. “The fingers on his right hand were dangling. I held his left hand. I told him help was coming. I told him I loved him.”

When Kaczynski stepped up his bombs and letters to newspapers and scientists in 1995, experts speculated the “Unabomber” was jealous of the attention being paid to the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

A threat to blow up a plane out of Los Angeles before the end of the Fourth of July weekend threw air travel and mail delivery into chaos. The Unabomber later claimed it was a “prank”.

The Washington Post printed the Unabomber’s manifesto at the urging of federal authorities, after the bomber said he would desist from terrorism if a national publication published his treatise.

Patrik had had a disturbing feeling about her brother-in-law even before seeing the manifesto and eventually persuaded her husband to read a copy at the library. After two months of arguments, they took some of Ted Kaczynski’s letters to Patrik’s childhood friend Susan Swanson, a private investigator in Chicago.

Swanson in turn passed them along to former FBI behavior science expert Clint Van Zandt, whose analysts said whoever wrote them had also probably written the Unabomber’s manifesto.

“It was a nightmare,” David Kaczynski, who as a child had idolized his older brother, said in a 2005 speech at Bennington College. “I was literally thinking, ‘My brother’s a serial killer, the most wanted man in America.’”

Swanson turned to a corporate lawyer friend, Anthony Bisceglie, who contacted the FBI.

David Kaczynski wanted his role kept confidential, but his identity quickly leaked out and Ted Kaczynski vowed never to forgive his younger sibling. He ignored his letters, turned his back on him at court hearings and described David Kaczynski in a 1999 book draft as a “Judas Iscariot [who] ... doesn’t even have enough courage to go hang himself.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... rison-cell

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski

[FD2]

Silvio 'bunga bunga' Berlusconi dead at 86.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ ... ister-dies

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... claim.html

[PHXPhlyer]

Cormac McCarthy, Pulitzer-winning novelist known for apocalyptic Westerns, dies at 89
In language that ranged from brutally austere to dizzyingly complex, McCarthy told tales of the dark side of humanity set against the vivid backdrop of the American West.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/obituaries ... -rcna89128

Cormac McCarthy, the masterful prose stylist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who plumbed the depths of violence and vengeance in novels such as "Blood Meridian," "No Country for Old Men" and "The Road," died Tuesday at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

He was 89.

McCarthy's death was announced in a statement by his publisher, Penguin Random House. The company — citing the writer's son, John McCarthy — said he died of natural causes.

In language that ranged from brutally austere to dizzyingly complex, McCarthy told tales of the dark side of humanity set against the vivid backdrop of the American West. He wrote all of his novels on a Olivetti Underwood Lettera 32 typewriter, his publisher said.

"Cormac McCarthy changed the course of literature," Nihar Malaviya, the CEO of Penguin Random House, said in a statement.

"For sixty years, he demonstrated an unwavering dedication to his craft, and to exploring the infinite possibilities and power of the written word," Malaviya said. "Millions of readers around the world embraced his characters, his mythic themes, and the intimate emotional truths he laid bare on every page, in brilliant novels that will remain both timely and timeless, for generations to come."

McCarthy won some of the top accolades in modern literature, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for the bleak post-apocalyptic saga "The Road," as well as the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

The literary critic James Wood, writing in The New Yorker in 2005, called McCarthy a "colossally gifted writer" and described him as "one of the great hams of American prose, who delights in producing a histrionic rhetoric that brilliantly ventriloquizes the King James Bible, Shakespearean and Jacobean tragedy, Melville, Conrad, and Faulkner."

McCarthy was famously averse to giving interviews to the press, speaking publicly only on rare occasions. In a 1992 interview with The New York Times, he suggested that his professional craft was only one of his driving passions in life, saying in part: "Of all the subjects I'm interested in, it would be extremely difficult to find one I wasn't. Writing is way, way down at the bottom of the list."

Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr. was born on July 20, 1933, in Providence, Rhode Island. He was raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, and briefly attended the University of Tennessee, where he started tinkering with short fiction. He published his debut novel, “The Orchard Keeper,” in 1965 at Random House, where he cultivated a deep relationship with the editor Albert Erskine that stretched across the next two decades, according to Penguin.

McCarthy’s style and thematic preoccupations drew from disparate influences, ranging from the haunting Southern Gothic prose of William Faulkner to the lyrical intricacy of James Joyce and the fire-and-brimstone intensity of the New Testament. He developed a cult following with works such as “Outer Dark” (1968), “Child of God” (1973) and “Blood Meridian” (1985). “Blood Meridian,” a terrifyingly violent tour through the American West, is considered by some critics to be his crowning achievement.

He reached a wider audience with a trio of books known as the “border trilogy”: “All the Pretty Horses” (1992), “The Crossing” (1994), and “Cities of the Plain” (1998). Two novels published in the 2000s — “No Country for Old Men” and “The Road” — drew wide acclaim and found favor in Hollywood. “No Country” was adapted into a chilling Oscar-winning thriller directed by Joel and Ethan Coen; “The Road” got the big-screen treatment with Viggo Mortensen in the lead role.

McCarthy published his final two novels in 2022: "The Passenger" and "Stella Maris," interconnected narratives that grappled with morality, science and faith.

PP

[OneHungLow]

It seems that in the end crime did not pay for Mr Knight.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/202 ... t-obituary

Ronnie Knight, the former London club owner, wide boy, convicted criminal and ex-husband of the actor Barbara Windsor, played as big a part as anyone in establishing the south of Spain as the “Costa del Crime”. For many years he acted as an unofficial consul for British criminals seeking a home away from the bothersome gaze of the police

.

[OneHungLow]

Glenda Jackson has died at the age of 87 after “a brief illness” at her home in London.

In a statement, her agent, Lionel Larner, said: “Glenda Jackson, two-time Academy Award-winning actress and politician, died peacefully at her home in Blackheath, London, this morning after a brief illness with her family at her side.”

Jackson bestrode the narrow worlds of stage and screen like a colossus over six decades. Though such a Shakespearean tribute would undoubtedly have had the famously curmudgeonly actor reaching for her familiar catchphrase: “Oh, come on. Good God, no,” nothing less will do for a star who emerged from a 23-year career break to play King Lear at the age of 82.

Not only did she win an Evening Standard theatre award for that performance, but she brought the audience to its feet by playing up to her ferocious reputation with an attack on the awards’ sponsor. For decades, the newspaper had scorned her as an actor, opposed her as an MP, she said, “so I’m left thinking what did I do wrong?”

Jackson began life in Birkenhead, Merseyside, in 1936, the first of four daughters born to a bricklayer father and a mother who worked as a cleaner. Her early dreams of becoming a dancer were thwarted when she grew too tall, and she left West Kirby grammar school for girls at 15 for a job on the shop floor of Boots.

Discovering that she liked acting, after being persuaded by a friend to join the local Townswomen’s Guild drama group, she applied to the one drama school she had heard of, Rada, with the proviso that she could only afford to go if she won a scholarship. She duly did. She was still a student there when she made her professional stage debut in the seaside town of Worthing in 1957, in a two-parter by Terence Rattigan, Separate Tables.

Six years as a jobbing actor and stage manager in repertory theatres around the country eventually brought her to the attention of the RSC, which she joined in 1964 just as the director Peter Brook was making a mark with a season entitled Theatre of Cruelty. He cast her in Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, as a prisoner assigned to play Marat’s assassin, Charlotte Corday, a performance that was recalled years later by the playwright David Edgar as one of the best he had ever seen, in a production that “changed British theatre for ever”.

She went on to reprise the role on film in 1967, by which time she had already made a fleeting screen debut in Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life. Her film career began in earnest two years later, when her performance as the abrasively sexual Gudrun, in Ken Russell’s adaptation of the DH Lawrence novel Women in Love, won her the first of two best actress Oscars, neither of which she turned up to receive. She later said she had bequeathed her statuettes to her mother, whose ferocious polishing soon rubbed the gilt away.

By the time she finished making Women in Love she was six months pregnant with her son, Dan, the only child of an 18-year marriage to fellow actor turned antique dealer Roy Hodges. But far from slowing down for a while, two years later she was back, in a rollercoaster of roles. Her achievements in 1971 included Tchaikovsky’s nymphomaniac wife in another Russell film, The Music Lovers; Queen Elizabeth I, in an influential TV six-parter Elizabeth R which won her two Emmys, and a mouthy, placard-wielding Cleopatra in the first of a series of comedy turns for the BBC’s Morecambe and Wise Show. In 1973 she won her second Oscar as sparring lover Vicki in the romantic comedy A Touch of Class.

Though she was outspoken about the lack of good parts for women, she continued to find them into her 50s, at which point she made the startling decision to give it all up and run for parliament. From her election in 1992 to her resignation in 2015, she turned her back on her previous stardom, devoting herself to representing the constituents of Hampstead and Kilburn in London as a Labour MP.

Any ambitions she may have had for a lead role in government were banjaxed by her outspoken opposition to the Iraq war. Grandstanding opportunities were limited to occasions such as the death of Margaret Thatcher, when she cut through sentimental parliamentary etiquette with her own salty verdict on an ideology of “greed, selfishness, no care for the weaker, sharp elbows, sharp knees”.

She followed her triumphal return to the theatre as King Lear with another award-winning performance, as the shuffling, vituperative 92-year-old widow A, in a Broadway revival of Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women, and as Maud, the Alzheimer’s-struck protagonist of Elizabeth Is Missing (of which Guardian TV critic Lucy Mangan wrote that she was “wonderful, in that vanishingly rare way that can come only from next-level talent as razor-sharp as it ever was plus 40 years of honing your technique, whetting both blades on 80 years of life experience.”)

She forsook her north London stronghold in her later years for a basement flat in the south London home of her son, Dan Hodges – now a political columnist whose views were markedly different from her own – where she gardened, watched her grandson growing up, and continued to pour the finest sort of scorn on any passing folly or hypocrisy.

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2023/ ... es-aged-87

[Karearea]

Sorry to read of Glenda Jackson's passing.
She was immensely talented and interesting.

(That sketch with Morecambe and Wise was memorably funny, thank you!)

[PHXPhlyer]

Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistleblower, dies at 92
Ellsberg in 1969 secretly photocopied a 7,000-page study privately commissioned by the Defense Department which revealed the U.S. government knew early on the Vietnam War could not be won.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/da ... -rcna73171

Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who exposed the U.S. government's lies about the Vietnam War by leaking the Pentagon Papers to some of the nation's top newspapers, has died, his family said in a statement on Friday.

He was 92.

Ellsberg's demise came about four months after he announced on Twitter that he had been diagnosed with "inoperable pancreatic cancer."

"I'm sorry to report to you that my doctors have given me three to six months to live," he wrote on March 2.

Ellsberg's family said in the statement that "he was not in pain, and was surrounded by loving family." And his sense of humor, they said, stayed with him until the very end.

"In his final days, surrounded by so much love from so many people, Daniel joked, 'If I had known dying would be like this, I would have done it sooner'," the statement said.

Ellsberg was working as an analyst for the RAND Corporation in 1969 when he and a colleague named Anthony Russo secretly photocopied a 7,000-page study privately commissioned by the Defense Department which revealed the U.S. government knew early on the Vietnam War could not be won.

American researcher Tony Russo (1936-2008) and American economist and political activist Daniel Ellsberg address the media during a recess in their trial at the Federal Courtroom in Los Angeles, California, 10th May 1973. Russo and Ellsberg stand accused of illegally copying and distributing the Pentagon papers relating to the Vietnam war; it emerged during the trial that the FBI put a wiretap on Ellsberg's telephone conversations in 1969 and 1970.

Initially, Ellsberg and Russo offered the study to several members of Congress and government officials before deciding to leak it to the newspapers.

Then-President Richard Nixon branded them traitors and tried to stop the publication of the Pentagon Papers, first in The New York Times and then in The Washington Post. But the U.S. Supreme Court in June 1971 sided with the newspapers with a landmark decision barring prior restraint of free expression.

Two days before that momentous decision was handed down, Ellsberg surrendered to the U.S. Attorney's office in Boston.

“I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public," he said. "I did this clearly at my own jeopardy and I am prepared to answer to all the consequences of this decision.”

Ellsberg and Russo were subsequently charged with espionage, theft and conspiracy for the leak. They went on trial in Los Angeles, where the papers had been copied, and Ellsberg faced a maximum of 115 years in prison if convicted.

But a federal judge dismissed the case in 1973, ruling that the government was guilty of misconduct, including an attempt by the White House to find ammunition to discredit Ellsberg by breaking into the office of his Beverly Hills psychiatrist.

Born April 7, 1931, in Chicago, Ellsberg was raised in Detroit and was the son of non-religious Jews who became devout Christian Scientists. He had his first brush with tragedy in 1946 when his mother and sister died in a car crash that happened after his father fell asleep at the wheel. He too had been in the car.

Daniel Ellsberg, Former US military analyst and the man behind a leak of US Pentagon documents to whistelbowing website Wikileaks, speaks on October 23, 2010 during a press conference at the Park Plaza hotel in central London. WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange said today that hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents leaked by the website showed the 'truth' on the Iraq war. "This disclosure is about the truth," Assange told a news conference in London after WikiLeaks released 400,000 documents which give a grim snapshot of the Iraq war, including showing the abuse of Iraqi civilians by Iraqi security forces.

Ellsberg earned an economics degree from Harvard in 1952 and enlisted in the Marines two years later. He returned to Harvard in 1957 after he was discharged as a first lieutenant.

Then, after his first stint at RAND and after earning a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard, Ellsberg in 1964 went to work at the Pentagon under then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.

For two years, Ellsberg was stationed in Vietnam where he worked for the State Department and when he returned to RAND in 1967 he began contributing to a top-secret history of the war that had been commissioned by McNamara.

Completed in 1968, it came to be called The Pentagon Papers.

By then, Ellsberg was already growing disenchanted with a war he once supported.

Ellsberg was dubbed "The Most Dangerous Man in America" after his role in releasing The Pentagon Papers was revealed.

In the years that followed, Ellsberg continued to oppose American wars in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and defended other whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. And while he condemned Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, he also warned it could lead to all-out war with Russia.

"The Russian invasion of Ukraine has made the world far more dangerous, not only in the short run, but in ways that may be irreversible," Ellsberg said in a June 2022 interview. "It is a tragic and criminal attack. We are seeing humanity at its almost worst, but not quite the worst — so far, since 1945 we haven’t seen nuclear war."

PP

[CharlieOneSix]

Jane Birkin dies aged 76. So many happy memories for me around the time of 'Je T'aime...moi non plus'. Amazing to think the Vatican condemned the song!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-66216417

[Boac]

Amazing to think the Vatican condemned the song!

Not really, since it contained sounds not dissimilar to sex with a woman, and that is, of course, only permitted with choirboys.

[tango15]

Amazing to think the Vatican condemned the song!

Not really, since it contained sounds not dissimilar to sex with a woman, and that is, of course, only permitted with choirboys.

I think the BBC banned it, too. No further comment...

[Hydromet]

C16, I woke up to that song, being played by our ABC station when the news of her death broke. Great song, but very sad news.

[PHXPhlyer]

Tony Bennett, legendary standards singer, dies at 96
Bennett provided the soundtrack for generations of romantic evenings and proved that his timeless brand of standards could have broad, consistent appeal as the music industry shifted with the rise of rock and rap.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/to ... -rcna42450

Tony Bennett, one of the most beloved and recognizable voices in the history of American popular music, died Friday at 96, less than two weeks shy of his birthday, his publicist said in a statement.

Bennett died in his hometown of New York, Sylvia Weiner said. A cause was not immediately disclosed.

Bennett provided the soundtrack for generations of romantic evenings and proved that his timeless brand of standards could have broad, consistent appeal as the music industry shifted with the rise of rock and rap.

In recent years, even as his velvety voice found purchase with a new generation, he privately faced a cognitive disorder. On Feb. 1, 2021, his family said in AARP magazine that Bennett had Alzheimer’s for the previous five years — even though he still managed to record more music.

“Life is a gift — even with Alzheimer’s,” Bennett’s official account tweeted at the time.

And what a gift it was: The life and career of Bennett, a World War II veteran and a civil rights activist, could provide fodder for a number of biopics, but his most enduring legacy is likely to be his unique vocal style, which made him a superstar in the 1950s and helped him enjoy a remarkable second act over the last 25 years of his life.

“The way that we dispose of music all the time, and dispose of art and decades (past) all the time, as if they’re dated, that being nostalgic is for geeks — it’s painful,” Bennett’s friend and frequent collaborator Lady Gaga said in 2015. “So much of the music that has been introduced through the Great American Songbook, through Fred Astaire, is passed on through generations of men and women, and Tony is one of those men.”

Born Anthony Dominick Benedetto on Aug. 3, 1926, in Astoria in the Queens borough of New York City, he got his start in music after having studied singing at the American Theatre Wing. He was reported to have been discovered by the legendary African American singer Pearl Bailey, who hired him to open for her in 1949.

A year later, Bennett began to make his own mark, signing with Columbia Records and crooning hits such as “Rags to Riches” and “Because of You.” His signature hit, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” arrived in 1962 as a B-side that launched him to the A-list.

The songs effectively straddled the worlds of pop and jazz while earning critical acclaim: Bennett won the 1962 Grammys for record of the year and solo vocal performance.

The statuettes would prove to be the first of 20 Grammys over his seven-decade career, including the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. He won his last Grammy for his collaborative album with Lady Gaga, “Love For Sale,” which was released in 2021.

Other accolades in his celebrated career include two Emmy awards and being named a Kennedy Center honoree, a Gershwin Prize honoree and a NEA Jazz Master.

Perhaps because of his close connection with jazz musicians, among them Duke Ellington and Count Basie, Bennett also launched himself into the civil rights movement of the era. He was recruited by the actor Harry Belafonte for Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1965 march from Selma, Alabama, a career risk at a time when his audience was predominantly white.

“I said I’m not, I’m walking away from all this,” Bennett told CNN in 2013. “This is just insane. It’s so ignorant. But then he told me what went down, what was going down, how some Blacks were burned, had gasoline thrown on them and they were burned. When I heard that, I said, ‘I’ll go with you.’ You know, I just realized that this is insanity.”

As popular music evolved, Bennett’s style fell out of fashion. And while aficionados praised some of his work in the late 1960s, the ‘70s and the ‘80s, audiences backed away. During this dark period, Bennett got heavily involved in drugs.

“I used to take pills — uppies, downies and sleepies,” he wrote in his 2011 autobiography. “I was in a completely self-destructive tailspin.”

And yet, Bennett survived and kicked his drug habit cold. He would emerge triumphant in the ‘90s, completing one of the most impressive comebacks in music history. He was embraced wholeheartedly by the MTV generation (recording duets with younger pop stars), and his 1994 “Unplugged” set for the network took home the Grammy for album of the year.

“It wasn’t a surprise at all,” Bennett told The Independent in 2011. “And I’ll tell you why. Good music is good music. I’m not concerned with whether someone who listens to me is old or young. In fact, in many ways, I’m not interested in the young at all. I’m interested in age. People learn to live properly when they get of an age, you know?

“The late Duke Ellington once said to me that he was really offended by the word ‘category,’” he added. “Music has no category; it’s either good or it isn’t, and I sing good songs, great songs, written by the best songwriters. It’s that kind of quality that makes them last. Trust me, people will be singing these songs forever.”

Between the recording sessions and concerts, Bennett proved that he had a talent for the visual arts, as well. His paintings, brushed under his birth name, have been exhibited in the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

His last public concert performances were at Radio City Music Hall on Aug. 3 and 5, 2021, to celebrate his 95th birthday.

He and his wife also founded the nonprofit group, Exploring the Arts, to support and fund arts education in public high schools. In that endeavor, the New York City public high school, Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, was founded in Astoria, his publicist said.

Bennett is survived by his wife since 2007, Susan Benedetto, and four children, including Antonia Bennett, who has become an accomplished standards singer in her own right.

PP

[Karearea]

Bless you and thank you for the music, Tony Bennett.

Loved the sound of his voice and his style.
It was especially moving to see him singing with Amy Winehouse.

[OneHungLow]

Sorry to hear that this talented, although troubled singer, has died so young. She lost her son to suicide at the age of 17 last year.

[Karearea]

Oh! That's shocking! Poor lady...

[PHXPhlyer]

Sinéad O’Connor, Irish singer who rose to fame with 'Nothing Compares 2 U,' dies at 56
The acclaimed artist was also known for courting controversy, including boycotting the Grammys and ripping up a photo of the pope on NBC's "Saturday Night Live."

https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/pop ... -rcna96482

Irish singer Sinead O’Connor has died at the age of 56.

“It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Sinéad. Her family and friends are devastated and have requested privacy at this very difficult time,” the singer’s family said in a statement to The Irish Times and the BBC. A cause of death was not given.

The artist, who courted controversy throughout her long career, rose to fame with her 1990 rendition of the Prince song “Nothing Compares 2 U,” which peaked at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 that same year.

Her death comes one year after her 17-year-old son, Shane O’Connor, died of an apparent suicide. She announced his passing in January 2022.

In her lengthy career she released 10 studio albums, kicking it off with her 1987 alternative rock debut, “The Lion and the Cobra”

O'Connor, who was born in Dublin, made as many headlines for her activism and provocations as she did for her music.

In 1991 she said she’d boycott the Grammy awards, claiming the Recording Academy awarded artists based on commercial success.

In October 1992, she infamously tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II and said, "Fight the real enemy," while performing as a musical guest on “Saturday Night Live.” She explained the move was in protest of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

The move was met with an onslaught of high-profile criticism, with actor Joe Pesci threatening to smack her in his “Saturday Night Live” monologue and Madonna mocking her on the same stage by ripping up a photo of Long Island sex offender Joey Buttafuoco, saying, "Fight the real enemy." Frank Sinatra went as far as to call her “one stupid broad." The move was also criticized by the Anti-Defamation League.

“I’m not sorry I did it. It was brilliant,” O’Connor said to The New York Times in 2021. “But it was very traumatizing.”

Despite declaring that she was not a mainstream pop star, she was nominated for several Grammys and won best alternative music performance for “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” in 1991.

For much of her career, she spoke candidly and openly about her spiritual life, political views and struggles with mental health, which she detailed in her 2021 memoir “Rememberings.”

In 2018, O'Connor converted to Islam and changed her name to “Shuhada.”

“This is to announce that I am proud to have become a Muslim,” she wrote on Twitter on October 2018. “This is the natural conclusion of any intelligent theologian’s journey. All scripture study leads to Islam. Which makes all other scriptures redundant.”

The prime minister of Ireland, Leo Varadkar, tweeted Wednesday: “Really sorry to hear of the passing of Sinéad O’Connor. Her music was loved around the world and her talent was unmatched and beyond compare. Condolences to her family, her friends and all who loved her music."

PP

[PHXPhlyer]

Randy Meisner, founding member of the Eagles, dies at 77

https://www.abc15.com/news/national/ran ... dies-at-77

Randy Meisner, a founding member of the Eagles who added high harmonies to such favorites as "Take It Easy" and "The Best of My Love" and stepped out front for the waltz-time ballad "Take It to the Limit," has died, the band said Thursday.

Meisner died Wednesday night in Los Angeles of complications from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the Eagles said in a statement. He was 77.

The bassist had endured numerous afflictions in recent years and personal tragedy in 2016 when his wife, Lana Rae Meisner, accidentally shot herself and died. Meanwhile, Randy Meisner had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and had severe issues with alcohol, according to court records and comments made during a 2015 hearing in which a judge ordered Meisner to receive constant medical care.

Called "the sweetest man in the music business" by former bandmate Don Felder, the baby-faced Meisner joined Don Henley, Glenn Frey and Bernie Leadon in the early 1970s to form a quintessential Los Angeles band and one of the most popular acts in history.

PP

[Karearea]

^ Those sublime, magic, notes in "Take It to the Limit"

- what a loss.

[FD2]

'Jani' Allan https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/ ... -obituary/


Jani Allan, South African-born journalist who lost ‘the libel case of the century’ – obituary

She sued over claims that she had been sexually involved with the white supremacist Eugène Terreblanche
By Telegraph Obituaries 28 July 2023 • 5:59pm

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Jani Allan, who has died of cancer aged 70, was a star columnist of the liberal-leaning and influential Sunday Times of South Africa who in 1992 failed in her sensational attempt to sue Channel 4 for libel; she claimed that the documentary, The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife (1991), falsely alleged that she had been sexually involved with the Right-wing supremacist Eugène Terreblanche.

The proceedings attracted intense interest in both Britain and South Africa, with several character witnesses flown in from South Africa for what Private Eye called the “libel case of the century”. Jani Allan, who had engaged the libel lawyer Peter Carter-Ruck, was represented by Charles Gray QC, and Channel 4 by George Carman QC.

The story had its origins in 1987 when Jani Allan, a glamorous blonde social butterfly with glossy red lips and large brown eyes, was sent to interview Terreblanche, the charismatic leader of the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB). “Look, the man’s no mimsy. To be honest, he’s a hunk,” she wrote in her copy. “Right now I’ve got to remind myself to breathe. I’m impaled on the blue flames of his blowtorch eyes.”

Jani Allan regarded the assignment as a triumph. “Everything he said would make for great copy,” she recalled. “I had succeeded in penetrating the enemy camp.” A follow-up piece about an AWB training facility drew ugly threats, but Jani Allan was unrepentant, insisting it was her job to interview all players in the apartheid-ridden country.

When she was seen dining in a Pretoria steakhouse with Terreblanche, a married man, however, tongues began wagging. She was also with him when he was accused of ramming his car through the gate of an Afrikaner monument in the conservative town of Krugersdorp, near Johannesburg.

Shortly afterwards a wheel on her car was loosened and fell off while she was driving. Then her apartment was bombed. She was advised to leave the country and work from Britain. Soon afterwards her South African newspaper column was cancelled and she instead found occasional work on the Sunday Times in London.

Before long parts of the British press were repeating the insinuations about a relationship with Terreblanche. Options magazine and the Evening Standard settled her libel actions quickly but Channel 4 denied that its programme was libellous and chose to fight, setting the stage for a sordid but gripping libel trial presided over by Sir Humphry Potts.

The High Court heard that Jani Allan’s flatmate, Linda Shaw, had peeped through a keyhole and witnessed her having sex with Terreblanche. Responding to Carman’s cross-examination, Linda Shaw described seeing Jani Allan “flattened beneath a large white bottom … going up and down between her raised knees”. Jani Allan refuted the claim, saying she had thought Terreblanche “looked rather like a pig in a safari suit”.

The exchanges in court were frequently salacious. As The Daily Telegraph reported at length on Page 3, Andrew Broulidakis, a record producer who had known Jani Allan since childhood, told of meeting Linda Shaw for lunch to learn what information she was giving Channel 4: “Bearing in mind considerable quantities of alcohol had been consumed, there was a flirtatious aspect… If you want the exact words, she said to me, ‘I never trust a man until I’ve f----- him.’ With that in mind, we returned to her apartment.” Broulidakis added that they had sex three times in five hours.

Although Terreblanche submitted a sworn statement denying any relationship, Marlene Burger, Jani Allan’s former news editor, testified that the columnist had confided in her that the pair had been having an affair.

On the second day of the hearing Carman mysteriously produced Jani Allan’s 1984 diary. It contained her sexual fantasies about a married Italian airline pilot, casting doubt on her professed lack of sexual experience and her sworn testimony that she would never commit adultery.

Her own mother weighed in, saying of her daughter’s claim only ever to have slept with her former husband: “That’s precious little sex to have had at the age of 41. If it’s so, then she’s missed a lot in life. Some women have two partners a night.”

Carter-Ruck and Gray urged Jani Allan to drop the case, but she persisted. Meanwhile her medical records, stolen from a South African hospital, turned up in court showing that she used a contraceptive device.

So traumatised was Jani Allan by her cross-examination that she told Carman: “Whatever award is given for libel, being cross-examined by you would not make it enough money.” After the case she described him in The Spectator as “a small bewigged ferret”.

There was also drama outside the court. Anthony Travers, a former British representative of the AWB who had been attending the hearing, was stabbed in the street, possibly mistaken for Carter-Ruck. Meanwhile, Jani Allan’s London flat was burgled and she received a telephone death threat in the court ushers’ office.

On August 5 the jury decided, after four-and-a-half hours’ deliberation, that Channel 4 had not libelled Jani Allan, leaving her with costs in excess of £300,000 and her reputation destroyed. “I have always equated sex with punishment,” she told The Sunday Telegraph. “And now this has been proved conclusively.”

She was born on September 11 1952, the product of an unwanted pregnancy. She was adopted at a month old by John Allan, a Scot who became chief sub-editor of The Star in South Africa, and his wife Janet (née Henning). They named her Isobel Janet Allan, though she did not learn of her adoption until she was 18.

Her father died when she was 18 months old and her mother went to work at De Beers, leaving her with a Zulu male nanny named Dennis. Her mother remarried an English widower called Walter Fry and fostered three more children, one of whom sexually abused her.

Music was ever present and young Isobel, known to her mother as Juliette, took to the piano, performing with the Johannesburg Symphony Orchestra at the age of 10. She read Chaucer at night and had lessons in ballet, art, elocution and Scottish dancing.

By 13 she had a pony called Prince, but when she fell off her mother made her get straight back on, saying: “Cease this detestable boo-hooing.” Her mother’s other advice included the rule that if she must sit on a man’s knee, “put a telephone directory on his lap.”

She was educated at Greenside High School, studied Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand, worked as a photographer’s model, wrote film and classical music reviews for newspapers, and taught English and art at Bryanston High School.

On the basis of her reviews she was offered a column on the Sunday Times called “Just Jani” because “Janet” would not fit on the page; thereafter she was known as Jani. Within weeks she had been dispatched to Corfu to interview Roger Moore on the set of For Your Eyes Only.

In 1987 a Gallup poll commissioned by the paper named Jani Allan “the most admired person in South Africa”. She was certainly among the best known. “I could delay the take-off of an aeroplane. I remember I was a bit late for a flight to, I think, Durban. I went like this to the pilot,” she told the South African Mail & Guardian, waving flirtatiously, “and they held it”.

Then came her fateful meeting with Terreblanche.

After the court case Jani Allan wrote occasional pieces for British newspapers including The Daily Telegraph. Trouble seemed to follow her and for a time she found herself being inadvertently used to spy on the African National Congress’s enemies in Britain.

Returning to South Africa, Jani Allan became a born-again Christian and a speechwriter for Chief Buthelezi, the former leader of the KwaZulu government. She also had a late-night radio show, Jani’s World, but that was cancelled after she interviewed another rightwing extremist. Meanwhile, Terreblanche was murdered by a black farm worker in 2010.

Fleeing to America, Jani Allan wound up as an anonymous waitress in the small town of Lambertville, New Jersey, going by her former nickname Juliette. In 2013 she started a blog, demonstrating that she had not lost her readable style and wit. “There is also a chance of collateral windfall,” she wrote of her new life. “An arguing couple once stormed out of the restaurant forgetting a bottle of Dom Pérignon.”

Jani Allan married Gordon Schachat, a South African businessman, in 1982. When the marriage was dissolved in 1984 she blamed her own lack of interest in sex. In 2002 she married Peter Kulish, an American advocate of the controversial biomagnetic therapy; that too was dissolved.

Jani Allan, born September 11 1952, died July 25 2023