Ravi Shankar, Grammy-winning Indian sitar virtuoso, dies at 92
 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/...e59_story.html

http://www.trbimg.com/img-50c80d2c/t...2-2012-001/600

Gloria Davy, First African-American to Sing Aida at the Met
 

Gloria Davy, a Brooklyn-born soprano who was the first African-American to sing Aida with the Metropolitan Opera, died on Nov. 28 in Geneva. She was 81.

A lirico-spinto (the term denotes a high voice that is darker and more forceful than a lyric soprano’s), Ms. Davy performed mainly in Europe from the 1960s onward. She was equally, if not better, known as a recitalist.

In particular, she was an interpreter of 20th-century music, including the work of Richard Strauss, Benjamin Britten and Paul Hindemith.

Though she was praised by critics for the beauty of her voice, the sensitivity of her musicianship and the perfection of her pianissimos — the elusive art of attaining maximum audibility at minimum volume — Ms. Davy sang with the Met just 15 times over four seasons, from her debut in the title role of Verdi’s “Aida,” opposite Leonard Warren, in 1958 to her final performance, as Leonora in Verdi’s “Trovatore,” opposite Giulio Gari, in 1961. She also sang Pamina in Mozart’s “Magic Flute” and Nedda in Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci” with the company. In concert, she appeared with the New York Philharmonic and at Carnegie Hall and Town Hall in New York.

The daughter of parents who had come to the United States from St. Vincent, in the Windward Islands, Gloria Davy was born on March 29, 1931. Her father, according to a 1959 article about her in Ebony magazine, worked as a token clerk in the New York City subway system.

She graduated from the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan and in 1951 and 1952 received the Marian Anderson Award. The prize, for young singers, was established in 1943 by Ms. Anderson, the first black singer to appear at the Met.

After receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1953 from the Juilliard School, where she studied with Belle Julie Soudent, Ms. Davy embarked on a career as a concert singer.

In January 1954, as a prize for having won a vocal competition sponsored by the Music Education League, Ms. Davy appeared at Town Hall with the Little Orchestra Society, singing Britten’s song cycle “Les Illuminations,” a rigorous undertaking for even a seasoned singer.

That May, Ms. Davy replaced Leontyne Price as Bess in an international tour of “Porgy and Bess,” providing her with her first significant stage experience.

When Ms. Davy first sang at the Met, she was only the fourth African-American to appear there, after Ms. Anderson, a contralto, and Robert McFerrin, a baritone, both of whom made their debuts in 1955, and the soprano Mattiwilda Dobbs, who first sang there the next year. (The African-American soprano Camilla Williams, who died this year, had made her debut with the New York City Opera in 1946.)

Before Ms. Davy was cast in the role, Aida, an Ethiopian princess, was perennially sung by white singers in dark makeup.

Ms. Davy’s other opera work includes appearances with the American Opera Society, a midcentury ensemble in New York, with which she sang the title role in Donizetti’s “Anna Bolena.” In Europe, she appeared at the Vienna Staatsoper and at Covent Garden in London.

For decades Ms. Davy had made her home in Geneva, returning to the United States periodically to perform and teach: she was on the faculty of the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University from 1984 to 1997.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/ar...t-81.html?_r=0

Victims of the Conn school shooting
 

Children:
Charlotte Bacon, 6
Daniel Barden, 7
Olivia Engel, 6
Josephine Gay, 7
Ana M. Marquez-Greene, 6
Dylan Hockley, 6
Madeleine F. Hsu, 6
Catherine V. Hubbard, 6
Chase Kowalski, 7
Jesse Lewis, 6
James Mattioli, 6
Grace McDonnell, 7
Emilie Parker, 6
Jack Pinto, 6
Noah Pozner, 6
Caroline Previdi, 6
Jessica Rekos, 6
Avielle Richman, 6
Benjamin Wheeler, 6
Allison N. Wyatt, 6

ADULTS
Mary Sherlach, 56
Victoria Soto, 27
Anne Marie Murphy, 52
Lauren Rousseau, 30
Dawn Hocksprung, 47
Rachel Davino, 29

May They NEVER Be Forgotten
 

Charlotte Bacon, 6, Daniel Barden, 7, Olivia Engel, 6, Josephine Gay, 7, Ana M. Marquez-Greene, 6, Dylan Hockley, 6, Madeleine F. Hsu, 6, Catherine V. Hubbard, 6, Chase Kowalski, 7, Jesse Lewis, 6, James Mattioli, 6, Grace McDonnell, 7, Emilie Parker, 6, Jack Pinto, 6, Noah Pozner, 6, Caroline Previdi, 6, Jessica Rekos, 6, Avielle Richman, 6, Benjamin Wheeler, 6, Allison N. Wyatt, 6.


Rachel Davino, 29, Dawn Hochsprung, 47, Anne Marie Murphy, 52, Lauren Rousseau, 30, Mary Sherlach, 56, Victoria Soto, 27.
__________________

(w)

Jack Hanlon, actor in Our Gang films
 

Jack Hanlon, who had roles in the 1926 silent classic "The General" and in two 1927 "Our Gang" comedies, died Thursday in Las Vegas.

After a small role with Buster Keaton in "The General," he played mischievous kids in two of Hal Roach's "Our Gang/Little Rascals" films: "The Glorious Fourth" and "Olympic Games."

Hanlon also played an orphan in the 1929 drama "The Shakedown," and got an on-screen kiss from Greta Garbo in the 1930 film "Romance."

He appeared in eight more "talkies," including "Big Money" with Clark Gable, in the 1930s before calling it a career at the age of 16. He rarely made more than $5 a day.

Sen. Daniel Inouye
 

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, the influential Democrat who broke racial barriers on Capitol Hill and played key roles in congressional investigations of the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals, died Monday. He was 88.

Inouye, a senator since January 1963, was currently the longest serving senator and was president pro tempore of the Senate, third in the line presidential succession. His office said Monday that he died of respiratory complications at a Washington-area hospital.

Inouye was a World War II hero and Medal of Honor winner who lost an arm to a German hand grenade during a battle in Italy. He became the first Japanese-American to serve in Congress, when he was elected to the House in 1959, the year Hawaii became a state. He won election to the Senate three years later and served there longer than anyone in American history except Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who died in 2010 after 51 years in the Senate.

After Byrd's death, Inouye became president pro tem of the Senate, a largely ceremonial post that also placed him in the line of succession to the presidency, after the vice president and the speaker of the House.

Although tremendously popular in his home state, Inouye actively avoided the national spotlight until he was thrust into it. He was the keynote speaker at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and later reluctantly joined the Senate's select committee on the Watergate scandal. The panel's investigation led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

Inouye also served as chairman of the committee that investigated the Iran-Contra arms and money affair, which rocked Ronald Reagan's presidency.

A quiet but powerful lawmaker, Inouye ran for Senate majority leader several times without success. He gained power as a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee and chairman of the defense appropriations subcommittee before Republicans took control of the Senate in 1994.

When the Democrats regained control in the 2006 elections, Inouye became chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee. He left that post two years later to become chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee.

Inouye also chaired the Senate Indian Affairs Committee for many years. He was made an honorary member of the Navajo nation and given the name "The Leader Who Has Returned With a Plan."

In 2000, Inouye was one of 22 Asian-American World War II veterans who belatedly received the nation's top honor for bravery on the battlefield, the Medal of Honor. The junior senator from Hawaii at the time, Daniel Akaka, had worked for years to get officials to review records to determine if some soldiers had been denied the honor because of racial bias.

Conservative U.S. jurist Robert Bork dies at 85
 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Robert Bork, an American symbol of conservative judicial activism who played pivotal roles in Washington dramas around the Supreme Court and Watergate and whose name became a verb, died on Wednesday at age 85.

Nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by Republican President Ronald Reagan in 1987, Bork was rejected by the Democratic-led U.S. Senate over his conservative judicial philosophy. He became a potent symbol to conservatives.

"To bork" was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2002 with the definition, "To defame or vilify (a person) systematically, especially in the mass media, usually with the aim of preventing his or her appointment to public office; to obstruct or thwart (a person) in this way."

Bork was already known to Americans as a figure in the Watergate scandal - the man who carried out Richard Nixon's order to fire the special prosecutor in 1973's "Saturday Night Massacre" - when he was nominated to the Supreme Court.

Within 45 minutes of his nomination on July 1, 1987, Massachusetts Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy took to the Senate floor to denounce him as a man who wanted to outlaw abortion, ban the teaching of evolution and revive racial segregation. Bork said not a line of the speech was accurate.

After a fierce confirmation fight, the Senate in October rejected Bork 58-42, the largest margin of defeat for any Supreme Court nominee and a big loss for Reagan.

JUDICIAL CONSERVATIVE

Bork's judicial conservatism, and especially fears he might vote to overturn abortion rights, led liberal, civil rights and feminist groups to join ranks against him.

They charged that the burly, goateed Bork, then a federal judge, held views too extreme for the highest court. They warned he might cast the decisive vote to overturn the court's 1973 abortion rights decision and endanger anti-segregation rulings of the 1950s and 1960S, despite Bork's assurances he would not disturb "settled law."

His supporters saw a political witch hunt. In later court fights, they used memories of the Bork hearings to rally their conservative supporters.

Like many other conservative justices - although more outspoken and in great recorded detail - Bork held that judges should interpret the law narrowly according to the "original intent" of the Constitution's framers rather than making new law, which they called judicial activism.

At his confirmation hearings, Bork's long record of writings and decisions as an active jurist made him vulnerable to attack. Among the most controversial were his views that the Constitution contained no generalized right to privacy nor unlimited authorization of free speech.

He did little to help himself in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, appearing cold and ideological.

But he fired back at critics, denying he wanted to "turn back the clock" and saying he was the victim of a liberal public relations campaign that distorted his record.

He admitted the White House was caught by surprise by the intense opposition and echoed complaints by conservatives that Reagan should have done more to fight for the nomination. Justice Anthony Kennedy ended up being confirmed to the court in February 1988.

Bork's defeat for confirmation to the Supreme Court was "the decisive moment in politicizing the process of judicial selection," said Michael McConnell, a professor at Stanford Law School and a former federal judge who testified on Bork's behalf at the 1987 hearings. "The scurrilous attacks on his views and his character set a new low for the process, and has poisoned the atmosphere for judicial confirmations ever since."

Bork was bitter for years afterward and conservatives regarded him as a martyr to liberal activism and unreason.

Three months after the Senate quashed his nomination, Bork resigned as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit after six years of service and went into private law, scholarship and commentary, supporting conservative causes for years to come.

One stint was as an "expert consultant" to television broadcasters covering the 1991 confirmation hearings for another controversial Supreme Court nominee, Clarence Thomas.

Bork was also active in the background during the attempt the impeach President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s, lending his expertise and support to the impeachment process.

Before his nomination debacle, Bork had been best known for the brief role he had played as U.S. solicitor general at the Justice Department in a notorious 1973 Watergate episode.

He carried out Nixon's order to fire Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, who was demanding the release of Oval Office tape recordings Nixon wanted kept secret.

Bork's immediate superiors - Attorney General Elliott Richardson and his deputy - quit rather than fire Cox, stirring public outrage in what became known as "The Saturday Night Massacre."

The backlash ultimately led to Nixon's resignation, under threat of impeachment, in August 1974.

Bork later said he followed Nixon's order to prevent "massive resignations" at the Justice Department and restore order there.

Bork remained outspoken on judicial nominations. In 2005, when President George W. Bush nominated White House counsel Harriet Miers to succeed retiring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Bork was a leader among conservatives in opposing Miers.

In 2011, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney appointed Bork co-chair of his Judicial Advisory Committee, to advise the campaign on judicial nominations and legal policy questions.

Ex-MLB player Ryan Freel 36 found dead
 

MIAMI (AP) -- Ryan Freel, a former Major League Baseball player known for his fearless play but whose career was cut short after eight seasons by a series of head and other injuries, was found dead Saturday in Jacksonville, Fla. Freel, who was 36, died of what appeared to be a self-inflicted shotgun wound.

The speedy Freel spent six of his eight big league seasons with the Reds and finished his career in 2009 with a .268 average and 143 steals.

The Jacksonville native thrilled fans with his all-out style, yet it took a toll on his career. During his playing days, he once estimated he had sustained up to 10 concussions. Freel missed 30 games in 2007 after a collision with a teammate caused a concussion.

Freel showed no fear as he ran into walls, hurtled into the seats and crashed into other players trying to make catches. His jarring, diving grabs often made the highlight reels, and he was praised by those he played with and against for always having a dirt-stained uniform.

Freel also had trouble related to alcohol.

Jack Klugman dies
 

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Jack Klugman, the prolific, craggy-faced character actor and regular guy who was loved by millions as the messy one in TV's "The Odd Couple" and the crime-fighting coroner in "Quincy, M.E.," died Monday.

Never anyone's idea of a matinee idol, Klugman remained a popular star for decades simply by playing the type of man you could imagine running into at a bar or riding on a subway with — gruff, but down to earth, his tie stained and a little loose, a racing form under his arm, a cigar in hand during the days when smoking was permitted.

His was a city actor ideal for "The Odd Couple," which ran from 1970 to 1975 and was based on Neil Simon's play about mismatched roommates, divorced New Yorkers who end up living together. The show teamed Klugman — the sloppy sports writer Oscar Madison — and Tony Randall — the fussy photographer Felix Unger — in the roles played by Walter Matthau and Art Carney on Broadway and Matthau and Jack Lemmon in the 1968 film. Klugman had already had a taste of the show when he replaced Matthau on Broadway and he learned to roll with the quick-thinking Randall, with whom he had worked in 1955 on the CBS series "Appointment with Adventure."

In "Quincy, M.E.," which ran from 1976 to 1983, Klugman played an idealistic, tough-minded medical examiner who tussled with his boss by uncovering evidence of murder in cases where others saw natural causes.

The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, he was born in Philadelphia and began his acting career in college drama (Carnegie Institute of Technology). After serving in the Army during World War I, he went on to summer stock and off-Broadway, rooming with fellow actor Charles Bronson as both looked for paying jobs. He made his Broadway debut in 1952 in a revival of "Golden Boy." His film credits included Sidney Lumet's "12 Angry Men" and Blake Edwards' "Days of Wine and Roses" and an early television highlight was appearing with Humphrey Bogart and Henry Fonda in a production of "The Petrified Forest." His performance in the classic 1959 musical "Gypsy" brought him a Tony nomination for best featured (supporting) actor in a musical.

He also appeared in several episodes of "The Twilight Zone," including a memorable 1963 one in which he played a negligent father whose son is seriously wounded in Vietnam. His other TV shows included "The Defenders" and the soap opera "The Greatest Gift."

Charles Durning
 

Charles Durning, the two-time Oscar nominee who was dubbed the king of the character actors for his skill in playing everything from a Nazi colonel to the pope, died Monday. He was 89.

Durning may be best remembered by movie audiences for his Oscar-nominated, over-the-top role as a comically corrupt governor in 1982's "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas."

Durning received another Oscar nomination, for his portrayal of a bumbling Nazi officer in Mel Brooks' "To Be or Not to Be." He was also nominated for a Golden Globe as the harried police lieutenant in 1975's "Dog Day Afternoon."

He won a Golden Globe as best supporting TV actor in 1991 for his portrayal of John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald in the TV film "The Kennedys of Massachusetts" and a Tony in 1990 as Big Daddy in the Broadway revival of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."

He quickly made an impression on movie audiences the following year as the crooked cop stalking con men Paul Newman and Robert Redford in the Oscar-winning comedy "The Sting."

Dozens of notable portrayals followed. He was the would-be suitor of Dustin Hoffman, posing as a female soap opera star in "Tootsie;" the infamous seller of frog legs in "The Muppet Movie;" and Chief Brandon in Warren Beatty's "Dick Tracy." He played Santa Claus in four different movies made for television and was the pope in the TV film "I Would be Called John: Pope John XXIII."

Other films included "The Front Page," ''The Hindenburg," ''Breakheart Pass," ''North Dallas Forty," ''Starting Over," ''Tough Guys," ''Home for the Holidays," ''Spy Hard" and 'O Brother Where Art Thou?"

Durning also did well in television as a featured performer as well as a guest star. He appeared in the short-lived series "The Cop and the Kid" (1975), "Eye to Eye" (1985) and "First Monday" (2002) as well as the four-season "Evening Shade" in the 1990s.

General Norman Schwarzkopf
 

Desert Storm Commander Norman Schwarzkopf Dies

By MITCH STACY and LOLITA C. BALDOR Associated Press
Dec 28, 2012, 4:17 AM

Truth is, retired Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf didn't care much for his popular "Stormin' Norman" nickname.

The seemingly no-nonsense Desert Storm commander's reputed temper with aides and subordinates supposedly earned him that rough-and-ready moniker. But others around the general, who died Thursday in Tampa, Fla., at age 78 of complications from pneumonia, knew him as a friendly, talkative and even jovial figure who preferred the somewhat milder sobriquet given by his troops: "The Bear."

That one perhaps suited him better later in his life, when he supported various national causes and children's charities while eschewing the spotlight and resisting efforts to draft him to run for political office.

He lived out a quiet retirement in Tampa, where he'd served his last military assignment and where an elementary school bearing his name is testament to his standing in the community.

Schwarzkopf capped an illustrious military career by commanding the U.S.-led international coalition that drove Saddam Hussein's forces out of Kuwait in 1991 — but he'd managed to keep a low profile in the public debate over the second Gulf War against Iraq, saying at one point that he doubted victory would be as easy as the White House and the Pentagon predicted.

Schwarzkopf was named commander in chief of U.S. Central Command at Tampa's MacDill Air Force Base in 1988, overseeing the headquarters for U.S. military and security concerns in nearly two dozen countries stretching across the Middle East to Afghanistan and the rest of central Asia, plus Pakistan.

When Saddam invaded Kuwait two years later to punish it for allegedly stealing Iraqi oil reserves, Schwarzkopf commanded Operation Desert Storm, the coalition of some 30 countries organized by President George H.W. Bush that succeeded in driving the Iraqis out.

At the peak of his postwar national celebrity, Schwarzkopf — a self-proclaimed political independent — rejected suggestions that he run for office, and remained far more private than other generals, although he did serve briefly as a military commentator for NBC.

While focused primarily on charitable enterprises in his later years, he campaigned for President George W. Bush in 2000, but was ambivalent about the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In early 2003 he told The Washington Post that the outcome was an unknown: "What is postwar Iraq going to look like, with the Kurds and the Sunnis and the Shiites? That's a huge question, to my mind. It really should be part of the overall campaign plan."

Initially Schwarzkopf had endorsed the invasion, saying he was convinced that Secretary of State Colin Powell had given the United Nations powerful evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. After that proved false, he said decisions to go to war should depend on what U.N. weapons inspectors found.

He seldom spoke up during the conflict, but in late 2004 he sharply criticized Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the Pentagon for mistakes that included erroneous judgments about Iraq and inadequate training for Army reservists sent there.

"In the final analysis I think we are behind schedule. ... I don't think we counted on it turning into jihad (holy war)," he said in an NBC interview.

Schwarzkopf was born Aug. 24, 1934, in Trenton, N.J., where his father, Col. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, founder and commander of the New Jersey State Police, was then leading the investigation of the Lindbergh kidnap case. That investigation ended with the arrest and 1936 execution of German-born carpenter Richard Hauptmann for murdering famed aviator Charles Lindbergh's infant son.

The elder Schwarzkopf was named Herbert, but when the son was asked what his "H'' stood for, he would reply, "H."

As a teenager Norman accompanied his father to Iran, where the elder Schwarzkopf trained the Iran's national police force and was an adviser to Reza Pahlavi, the young Shah of Iran.

Young Norman studied there and in Switzerland, Germany and Italy, then followed in his father's footsteps to West Point, graduating in 1956 with an engineering degree. After stints in the U.S. and abroad, he earned a master's degree in engineering at the University of Southern California and later taught missile engineering at West Point.

In 1966 he volunteered for Vietnam and served two tours, first as a U.S. adviser to South Vietnamese paratroops and later as a battalion commander in the U.S. Army's Americal Division. He earned three Silver Stars for valor — including one for saving troops from a minefield — plus a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart and three Distinguished Service Medals.

While many career officers left military service embittered by Vietnam, Schwarzkopf was among those who opted to stay and help rebuild the tattered Army into a potent, modernized all-volunteer force.

After Saddam invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Schwarzkopf played a key diplomatic role by helping persuade Saudi Arabia's King Fahd to allow U.S. and other foreign troops to deploy on Saudi territory as a staging area for the war to come.

On Jan. 17, 1991, a five-month buildup called Desert Shield became Operation Desert Storm as allied aircraft attacked Iraqi bases and Baghdad government facilities. The six-week aerial campaign climaxed with a massive ground offensive on Feb. 24-28, routing the Iraqis from Kuwait in 100 hours before U.S. officials called a halt.

Schwarzkopf said afterward he agreed with Bush's decision to stop the war rather than drive to Baghdad to capture Saddam, as his mission had been only to oust the Iraqis from Kuwait.

But in a desert tent meeting with vanquished Iraqi generals, he allowed a key concession on Iraq's use of helicopters, which later backfired by enabling Saddam to crack down more easily on rebellious Shiites and Kurds.

While he later avoided the public second-guessing by academics and think tank experts over the ambiguous outcome of the first Gulf War and its impact on the second Gulf War, he told The Washington Post in 2003, "You can't help but ... with 20/20 hindsight, go back and say, 'Look, had we done something different, we probably wouldn't be facing what we are facing today.'"

After retiring from the Army in 1992, Schwarzkopf wrote a best-selling autobiography, "It Doesn't Take A Hero." Of his Gulf War role, he said: "I like to say I'm not a hero. I was lucky enough to lead a very successful war." He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and honored with decorations from France, Britain, Belgium, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain.

Schwarzkopf was a national spokesman for prostate cancer awareness and for Recovery of the Grizzly Bear, served on the Nature Conservancy board of governors and was active in various charities for chronically ill children.

"I may have made my reputation as a general in the Army and I'm very proud of that," he once told The Associated Press. "But I've always felt that I was more than one-dimensional. I'd like to think I'm a caring human being. ... It's nice to feel that you have a purpose."

Schwarzkopf and his wife, Brenda, had three children: Cynthia, Jessica and Christian.

Most likely a hoax. Google this.

According to Snopes, it is yet another of the many "Eddie Murphy is dead from snowboarding accident" hoaxes.

Jean Harris, 'Scarsdale Diet' doctor fame, dies
 

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) — Jean Harris, the patrician girls' school headmistress who spent 12 years in prison for the 1980 killing of her longtime lover, "Scarsdale Diet" doctor Herman Tarnower, in a case that rallied feminists and inspired television movies, has died. She was 89.

She had claimed the shooting of Tarnower, 69, was an accident. Convicted of murder in 1981, Harris suffered two heart attacks while serving her sentence in the Bedford Hills women's prison north of New York City. She was granted clemency by then-Gov. Mario Cuomo when she underwent heart bypass surgery in December 1992 and was released on parole three weeks later.

She later founded Children of Bedford Inc., a nonprofit organization to provide scholarships and tutoring for children of female prison inmates.

Her trial for shooting Tarnower, the millionaire cardiologist famous for devising the Scarsdale Diet — a weight-loss book and sensation of the 1970s named for the New York suburb where he practiced — brought feminists rallying to her defense.

They pictured her as a woman victimized by a male-dominated society, adrift because she was getting older and her lover of 14 years was brushing her off in favor of his younger office assistant. In addition, they said, she was in the thrall of antidepressant drugs Tarnower had prescribed for her.

Harris always maintained that she went armed to Tarnower's Westchester County estate in Purchase on March 10, 1980, to confront him over his womanizing and kill herself, but unintentionally shot him four times in a struggle over the gun. She later acknowledged at a parole hearing that she was "certainly guilty of something. I caused the man's death."

A jury convicted her of murder, and she was sentenced to 15 years to life.

Her lawyer had unsuccessfully gambled on an all-or-nothing strategy that eschewed an "extreme emotional disturbance" defense and did not allow the jury to consider a lesser charge such as manslaughter.

"As an inmate, Harris criticized authority, chafing under what she saw as arbitrary, counterproductive rules. In books and articles she wrote and in interviews, she advocated reform, both for her own benefit and that of other imprisoned women.

Housed in the prison's honor wing, she taught mothering skills to expectant inmates and worked in the Bedford Hills children's center.

Nobel Scientist Rita Levi-Montalcini Dies in Rome
 

I just found the story of this woman, who went from a makeshift lab in her bedroom to winning the Nobel prize for medicine, amazing.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wir...1#.UODHXXf9xXI


By By FRANCES D'EMILIO Associated Press
ROME December 30, 2012 (AP)

Rita Levi-Montalcini, a biologist who conducted underground research in defiance of Fascist persecution and went on to win a Nobel Prize for helping unlock the mysteries of the cell, died at her home in Rome on Sunday. She was 103 and had worked well into her final years.

Rome Mayor Gianni Alemanno, announcing her death in a statement, called it a great loss "for all of humanity." He praised her as someone who represented "civic conscience, culture and the spirit of research of our time."

Italy's so-called "Lady of the Cells," a Jew who lived through anti-Semitic discrimination and the Nazi invasion, became one of her country's leading scientists and shared the Nobel medicine prize in 1986 with American biochemist Stanley Cohen for their groundbreaking research carried out in the United States. Her research increased the understanding of many conditions, including tumors, developmental malformations, and senile dementia.

Italy honored Levi-Montalcini in 2001 by making her a senator-for-life.

A petite woman with upswept white hair, she kept an intensive work schedule well into old age. "At 100, I have a mind that is superior — thanks to experience — than when I was 20," she said in 2009.

"A beacon of life is extinguished" with her death, said a niece, Piera Levi-Montalcini, who is a city councilwoman in Turin. The ANSA news agency quoted her as saying her aunt didn't suffer.

Levi-Montalcini was born April 22, 1909, to a Jewish family in the northern city of Turin. At age 20 she overcame her father's objections that women should not study and obtained a degree in medicine and surgery from Turin University in 1936.

She studied under top anatomist Giuseppe Levi, whom she often credited for her own success and for that of two fellow students and close friends, Salvador Luria and Renato Dulbecco, who also became separate Nobel Prize winners. Levi and Levi-Montalcini were not related.

After graduating, Levi-Montalcini began working as a research assistant in neurobiology but lost her job in 1938 when Italy's Fascist regime passed laws barring Jews from universities and major professions.

Her family decided to stay in Italy and, as World War II neared, Levi-Montalcini created a makeshift lab in her bedroom where she began studying the development of chicken embryos, which would later lead to her major discovery of mechanisms that regulate growth of cells and organs.

With eggs becoming a rarity due to the war, the young scientist biked around the countryside to buy them from farmers. She was soon joined in her secret research by Levi, her university mentor, who was also Jewish and who became her assistant.

"She worked in primitive conditions," Italian astrophysicist Margherita Hack told Sky TG24 TV in a tribute to her fellow scientist. "She is really someone to be admired."

Another Italian scientist, who worked for some 40 years with Levi-Montalcini, including in the United States, said the work the Nobel laureate did on nerve growth factor was continuing. The protein assists portions of the central nervous system that have been damaged by disease or injury.

"Over the years, this field of investigation has become ever more important in the world of neuroscience," Pietro Calissano was quoted by ANSA as saying. Calissano began studying under Levi-Montalcini in 1965 and recalled her ability to relate to students on a very human level, with none of the elite airs that often characterize Italian professors.

"I remember we were in a closet with cell cultures when she offered me a fellowship," Calissano said. He added that research building on Levi-Montalcini's pioneering work continues. "We are working on a possible application in the treatment of Alzheimer's," he added.

The 1943 German invasion of Italy forced the Levi-Montalcini family to flee to Florence and live underground. After the Allies liberated the city, she worked as a doctor at a center for refugees.

In 1947 Levi-Montalcini was invited to the United States, where she remained for more than 20 years, which she called "the happiest and most productive" of her life. She held dual Italian-U.S. citizenship.

During her research at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, she discovered nerve growth factor, the first substance known to regulate the growth of cells. She showed that when tumors from mice were transplanted to chicken embryos they induced rapid growth of the embryonic nervous system. She concluded that the tumor released a nerve growth-promoting factor that affected certain types of cells.

The research increased the understanding of many conditions, including tumors, developmental malformations, and senile dementia. It also led to the discovery by Stanley Cohen of another substance, epidermal growth factor, which stimulates the proliferation of epithelial cells.

The two shared the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1986.

Levi-Montalcini returned to Italy to become the director of the laboratory of cell biology of the National Council of Scientific Research in Rome in 1969.

After retiring in the late 1970s, she continued to work as a guest professor and wrote several books to popularize science. She created the Levi-Montalcini Foundation to grant scholarships and promote educational programs worldwide, particularly for women in Africa.

In 2001 Levi-Montalcini was made a senator for life, one of the country's highest honors.

She then became active in Parliament, especially between 2006 and 2008, when she and other life senators would cast their votes to back the thin majority of center-left Premier Romano Prodi.

Levi-Montalcini had no children and never married, fearing such ties would undercut her independence.

"I never had any hesitation or regrets in this sense," she said in a 2006 interview. "My life has been enriched by excellent human relations, work and interests. I have never felt lonely."

'Tennessee Waltz' singer Patti Page dies at age 85
 

Unforgettable songs like "Tennessee Waltz" and "(How Much Is That) Doggie in the Window" made Patti Page the best-selling female singer of the 1950s and a star who would spend much of the rest of her life traveling the world.

Page died on New Year's Day in Encinitas, Calif., according to publicist Schatzi Hageman, ending one of pop music's most diverse careers. She was 85 and just five weeks away from being honored at the Grammy Awards with a Lifetime Achievement Award from The Recording Academy.

Page achieved several career milestones in American pop culture, but she'll be remembered for indelible hits that crossed the artificial categorizations of music and remained atop the charts for months to reach a truly national audience.

"Tennessee Waltz" scored the rare achievement of reaching No. 1 on the pop, country and R&B charts simultaneously and was officially adopted as one of two official songs by the state of Tennessee. Its reach was so powerful, six other artists reached the charts the following year with covers.

Two other hits, "I Went To Your Wedding" and "Doggie in the Window," which had a second life for decades as a children's song, each spent more than two months at No. 1. Other hits included "Mockin' Bird Hill," "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte," and "Allegheny Moon." She teamed with George Jones on "You Never Looked That Good When You Were Mine."

Page was one of the last surviving American singers who was popular in the pre-Elvis Presley era when songs on the pop charts leaned more toward innocence than rock `n' roll's overt obsession with sex. Page proved herself something of a match for the rockers, continuing to place songs on the charts into the 1960s.

Her popularity transcended music. She became the first singer to have television programs on all three major networks, including "The Patti Page Show" on ABC.

She was popular in pop music and country and became the first singer to have television programs on all three major networks, including "The Patti Page Show" on ABC. In films Page co-starred with Burt Lancaster in his Oscar-winning appearance of "Elmer Gantry," and she appeared in "Dondi" with David Janssen and in "Boy's Night Out" with James Garner and Kim Novak.

She also starred on stage in the musical comedy "Annie Get Your Gun."

In 1999, after 51 years of performing, Page won her first Grammy for traditional pop vocal performance for "Live at Carnegie Hall -- The 50th Anniversary Concert." Page was planning to attend a special ceremony on Feb. 9 in Los Angeles where she was to receive a lifetime achievement award from The Recording Academy.

Women's history pioneer Gerda Lerner dies at 92
 

MILWAUKEE (AP) -- Gerda Lerner spent her 18th birthday in a Nazi prison, sharing a cell with two gentile women arrested for political work who shared their food with the Jewish teenager because jailers restricted rations for Jews.

Lerner would say years later that the woman taught her during those six weeks how to survive and that the experience taught her how society can manipulate people. It was a lesson that the women's history pioneer, who died Wednesday at age 92, said she saw reinforced in American academia by history professors who taught as though only the men were worth studying.

"When I was faced with noticing that half the population has no history and I was told that that's normal, I was able to resist the pressure" to accept that conclusion, Lerner told the Wisconsin Academic Review in 2002.

The author was a founding member of the National Organization for Women and is credited with creating the nation's first graduate program in women's history, in the 1970s in New York.

Her son said she died peacefully of apparent old age at an assisted-living facility in Madison, where she helped establish a doctoral program in women's history at the University of Wisconsin.

"She was always a very strong-willed and opinionated woman," her son, Dan Lerner, told The Associated Press late Thursday. "I think those are the hallmarks of great people, people that have strong points of view and firmly held convictions."

She was born into a privileged Jewish family in Vienna, Austria, in 1920. When the Nazis rose to power, she was imprisoned alongside the two other young women.

"They taught me how to survive," Lerner wrote in "Fireweed: a Political Autobiography." "Everything I needed to get through the rest of my life I learned in jail in those six weeks."

She became impassioned about the issue of gender equality. As a professor at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., she founded a women's studies program - including the first graduate program in women's history in the U.S.

She later moved to Madison, where she helped establish a doctoral program in women's history at the University of Wisconsin.

Her daughter, Stephanie Lerner, said her mother earned a reputation as a no-nonsense professor who held her students to rigorous standards that some may not have appreciated at the time. One former student wrote to Gerda Lerner 30 years later saying no one had been more influential in her life.

"She said, `I thought you were impossible, difficult, not understanding, but you gave me a model of commitment that I've never had before,'" Stephanie Lerner recalled. "That's just how she was."

Even as Gerda Lerner held others to high standards, she took no shortcuts herself. For example, Stephanie Lerner said her mother loved hiking in the mountains, even as she got older and her mobility was challenged.

Stephanie Lerner recalled one particular hike with her mother about 30 years ago on a steamy California day. Stephanie Lerner brought a light day-pack, but Gerda Lerner toted a hefty 50-pound sack because she wanted to train for future hikes.

"I was much younger and very in shape. But at a certain point I said I couldn't do it anymore," Stephanie Lerner said. "She just went on ahead. That was her joy, her determination."

Gerda Lerner wrote several textbooks on women's history, including "The Creation of Patriarchy" and "The Creation of Feminist Consciousness." She also edited "Black Women in White America," one of the first books to document the struggles and contributions of black women in American history.

She married Carl Lerner, a respected film editor, in 1941. They lived in Hollywood for a few years before returning to New York.

The couple were involved in activism that ranged from attempting to unionize the film industry to working in the civil rights movement.

When asked how she developed such a strong sense of justice and fairness, she told the Wisconsin Academy Review that the feeling started in childhood. She recalled watching her mother drop items on the floor and walk away, leaving servants to clean up her mess.

"I wanted the world to be a just and fair place, and it obviously wasn't - and that disturbed me right from the beginning," she said.

She became determined to fight for equality, and she encouraged others to take up their own fights against inequality. She said people who want to change the world don't need to be part of a large organized group - they just have to find a cause they believe in and never stop fighting for it.

She credited that philosophy for helping her remain happy despite the horrors she lived through as a young woman.

"I am happy because I found the balance between adjusting, or surviving what I was put through, and acting for what I believed in," she said in 2002. "That's the key."

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Let it sink into your conciousness, your heart, your will, your values, your actions.

Rex Trailer
 

BOSTON (AP) - Rex Trailer, the native Texan beloved by a generation of New England children for the cowboy skills he demonstrated on the Boston-based television show "Boomtown," has died. He was 84.

"Boomtown" ran on Boston television from 1956 until 1974. Trailer hosted the show, singing, playing guitar and showing off the horse-riding, roping and other cowboy skills he had learned as a boy on his grandfather's ranch in Texas.

The show was an instant success when it first aired, the live studio audience enraptured by Trailer's Texas twang. It aired live every Saturday and Sunday morning for three hours. More than 250,000 kids appeared on "Boomtown" over the years and more than 4 million watched from home, according to the Massachusetts Broadcasters Hall of Fame. Trailer was inducted in 2007.

In addition to the cowboy action, the show offered educational games and films, cartoons and outdoor adventure.

He was a visionary in a lot of ways. He was doing educational children's television before there was educational children's television.

The show was one of the first where mentally and physically disabled children were prominent in the audience, a conscious decision by Trailer.

In 1961, he led a wagon train across the state to raise awareness about children with disabilities.

Trailer has been honored for his lifetime commitment to disabled children, especially muscular dystrophy.

He taught on-camera performance and production at Emerson College in Boston since the mid-1970s, and ran his own production company based in Waltham that produced commercials, industrial films and documentaries. Trailer was also an accomplished pilot and recording artist, who even wrote the theme music to "Boomtown."

Trailer got into show business on the advice of the ranch hands on his grandfather's farm in Thurber, Texas. He got a job as a production coordinator with the Dumont Network in New York and worked his way up to producer and director. It was in New York where he first became an on-air talent as host of the "Oky Doky Ranch."

He hosted western-themed TV shows in Philadelphia for five years before landing in Boston in 1955. His original 13-week contr act with WBZ-TV lasted nearly 20 years. When "Boomtown" went off the air, Trailer doffed his cowboy hat and hosted a science-themed children's show for several years called "Earth Lab."

His reach was so wide that in 2011 a state senator introduced legislation to make Trailer the "Official Cowboy of Massachusetts."