CRAP!!! Really bummed to hear about Cory Monteith. I was a Glee fan that first season. I feel really bad for his girlfriend (Lea Michele). This sucks. I was really hopeful he was going to make it.

Beating death of LGBT activist Eric Lembembe in Cameroon
 

It's heartbreaking! I read that he was going to move in with his girlfriend when he got back to LA. She just must be devastated! I wonder how he will be written out of, Glee...

RIP Cory
 

The adamantly homophobic Westboro Baptist Church has announced plans to picket the funeral of deceased Glee star Cory Monteith.

The church, which often pickets the funerals of those seen to be pro-gay or accepting of LGBT people, tweeted to say that it would picket Monteith’s funeral because he supported openly-gay co-star Chris Colfer.

The organisation also went on to suggest that Monteith’s girlfriend Lea Michele – also a Glee actor- should kill herself.

The straight star played Finn Hudson in the popular US TV series Glee, and was found dead in a Vancouver hotel room at the weekend, aged 31.

“Westboro praises God for his righteous judgments. Hell won’t be gleeful for #CoryMonteith – he taught millions to sin,” the group tweeted, in a string of tweets about the late star.

Another tweet read: “Hell won’t be gleeful for Cory Monteith.”

Last month the church took umbrage at a pink lemonade stand run by a 5-year-old in the name of an anti-bullying campaign, and told her she would “burn in hell”.

The church previously tweeted PinkNews to say that God sent the killers in the suspected terror killing in Woolwich, London, because the equal marriage bill passed its third reading in the House of Commons.

It previously thanked God for a lethal tornado that ripped through Moore, Oklahoma, leaving at least 24 people dead, saying it’s because of gay basketball player Jason Collins.


http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2013/07/16...cory-monteith/

I am speachless--will the hating ever stop?

"“PRAISE GOD ALMIGHTY for killing Cory Monteith — a wicked f**-enabling sinner! Westboro Baptist Church to picket his funeral,” the church wrote to Chris Colfer, who plays gay chorus member Kurt Hummel, as well as several other cast members."

http://legalpronews.findlaw.com/article/08081dCdlj1jA

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...n_3598346.html


Yes it is hard to believe, but true.

Multiple legitimate sources, including GLADD, have documented Westboro's tweets.

I am glad to read that the family averted anything of the sort from occurring by cremation (which may have been his expressed preference previously).

On a side note...

I just took a look - my first - at the Westboro Baptist Church website.

I literally feel sick.

Words

From the New York Times:

Laurie Frink,Trumpeter and Brass Instructor to Many, Dies at 61
By NATE CHINEN
Published: July 17, 2013

Laurie Frink, an accomplished trumpeter who became a brass instructor of widespread influence and high regard, died on Saturday at her home in Manhattan. She was 61.

The cause was cancer of the bile duct, said the classical violist Lois Martin, her partner of 25 years.

Ms. Frink built her trumpet career as a section player, starting when few women were accepted in those ranks. She worked extensively on Broadway and with the Benny Goodman Orchestra, the Mel Lewis Orchestra and Gerry Mulligan’s Concert Jazz Band, often playing lead...



http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/ar...dayspaper&_r=0

Pioneering journalist Helen Thomas dies at 92

By CALVIN WOODWARD
Associated Press
Published: Saturday, Jul. 20, 2013 - 7:47 am

Thomas was at the forefront of women's achievements in journalism. She was one of the first female reporters to break out of the White House "women's beat" — the soft stories about presidents' kids, wives, their teas and their hairdos — and cover the hard news on an equal footing with men.

She became the first female White House bureau chief for a wire service when UPI named her to the position in 1974. She was also the first female officer at the National Press Club, where women had once been barred as members and she had to fight for admission into the 1959 luncheon speech where Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev warned: "We will bury you."

The belligerent Khrushchev was an unlikely ally in one sense. He had refused to speak at any Washington venue that excluded women, she said.

Thomas fought, too, for a more open presidency, resisting all moves by a succession of administrations to restrict press access.

"People will never know how hard it is to get information," Thomas told an interviewer, "especially if it's locked up behind official doors where, if politicians had their way, they'd stamp TOP SECRET on the color of the walls."

Born in Winchester, Ky., to Lebanese immigrants, Thomas was the seventh of nine children. It was in high school, after working on the student newspaper, that she decided she wanted to become a reporter.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/07/20/558...#storylink=cpy

Influential British comedian Mel Smith dies
 

Dennis Farina, star of 'Law & Order,' dead at 69
 

Virginia Johnson (of Masters and Johnson)
 

Virginia Johnson, part of the husband-wife research team that transformed the study of sex in the 1960s and wrote two best-selling books on sexuality, has died in St. Louis. She was 88.

Johnson, who grew up in rural Missouri near the small town of Golden City, was a twice-divorced mother in her 30s when she went job-hunting at Washington University in St. Louis in the late 1950s. She was trying to support her young family while she pursued a college degree.

She soon became an assistant to obstetrician-gynecologist William Masters, and later his lover and co-collaborator on a large-scale human sexuality experiments.

Johnson recruited graduate students, nurses, faculty wives and other participants for what was described as the "biggest sex experiment in U.S. histor y." The after-hours research, first on the medical school campus at Washington University and later at a nearby building, shattered basic perceptions about female sexuality, including Freud's concept that vaginal - rather than clitoral - orgasm was the more mature sexual response for women. She took the case studies - and asked the uncomfortable questions.

Hundreds of couples, not all of them married, would participate in the observed research, later discussed in their 1966 book, "Human Sexual Response." That book and their second, 1970's "Human Sexual Inadequacy," were both best-sellers.

For the next 20 years, Masters and Johnson were celebrities, the topic of late-night talk show hosts and on the cover of news magazines. "The family feeling was they changed the study of sex with the landmark publishing of their books," Scott Johnson said.

Masters and Johnson married in 1971 and divorced after 20 years. The Masters and Johnson Institute in St. Louis closed in 1994. Masters died in 2001.

Lindy Boggs, congresswoman and civil rights crusader, dies at 97
 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Lindy Boggs, who took over her husband's congressional seat to become a crusader for women's equality and civil rights, died Saturday at 97. Her death was confirmed by ABC News, where Boggs' daughter, Cokie Roberts, is a journalist.

The matriarch of a powerful Washington family, Boggs served in the U.S. House of Representatives as a Louisiana Democrat for 18 years, beginning in 1973, when she become the first woman elected to Congress from her state.

She was a permanent chairwoman of the 1976 Democratic National Convention and also served as U.S. ambassador to the Vatican from 1997 to 2001.

The Boggs children came to prominence in politics, law and the media. In addition to Roberts, an author and journalist at National Public Radio as well as ABC TV, Boggs' son Thomas Hale Boggs Jr. is an influential Washington lawyer. Another daughter, Barbara Boggs Sigmund, died of cancer in 1990 while she was mayor of Princeton, New Jersey.

Boggs won a special election to Congress six months after the death of her husband, House Majority Leader Thomas Hale Boggs. He was presumed to have died in a plane crash in a remote part of Alaska, although his body was never found.

In Congress, Mrs. Boggs was elected to her first full term in 1974 and re-elected seven times after that, always by wide margins, and four times unopposed in a district that after the 1980 census was redrawn to include an African American majority.

Born Marie Corinne Morrison Claiborne in Brunswick Plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish, Boggs attended Sophie Newcomb College at Tulane University, a premier institution of higher education for young Louisiana women.

With a political family pedigree that stretched back to George Washington's day and included governors of Louisiana and Mississippi, Boggs came to Washington at 24 with her newly elected husband to exert behind-the-scenes influence until she herself was elected to office.

In her 1994 memoir, "Washington Through a Purple Veil," Boggs described her attempt to enter the 1941 House of Representatives to hear her husband deliver a speech. She was so simply dressed that the guard kept her out until she returned, draped in a purple veil. She recalled that a friend had told her that "the most sophisticated and becoming thing a woman could wear was a purple veil."

She worked for the Civil Rights Acts of 1965 and 1968, Head Start and other programs to help minorities, the poor and women.

Boggs used her seat on the House Appropriations Committee to steer money to New Orleans and the rest of Louisiana, and on the House Banking and Currency Committee managed to include women in the Equal Credit and Opportunity Act of 1974.

A strong Southern "steel magnolia" before that term entered the vernacular, Boggs recalled how she managed to include women in the credit act by writing in that the law should help people regardless of "sex and marital status" on the bill and making a copy for all of the committee's members.

"Knowing the members composing this committee as well as I do, I'm sure it was just an oversight that we didn't have 'sex' or 'marital status' included," she said she told her congressional colleagues. "I've taken care of that, and I trust it meets with the committee's approval."

After her political and ambassadorial service, Boggs returned to New Orleans, where her Bourbon Street home was damaged in Hurricane Katrina in 2005. She later moved to Chevy Chase, Maryland

Eileen Brennan Dies at 80
 

Eileen Brennan, who went from musical comedy on Broadway to wringing laughs out of memorable movie characters, died Sunday in Burbank, Calif. She was 80.

Brennan got her first big role on the New York stage in Little Mary Sunshine, a musical comedy that won her the 1960 Obie award for best actress. Along with her "excellent singing voice," her performance was "radiant and comic," said a New York Times review.

She went on to win fans for her sharp-tongued roles on television and in movies, including gruff Army Capt. Doreen Lewis in 1980's Private Benjamin, aloof Mrs. Peacock in 1985's Clue, and mean orphanage superintendent Miss Bannister in 1988's The New Adventures of Pippi Longstocking.

Private Benjamin brought her a Best Supporting Actress nomination for an Oscar. She won an Emmy for repeating her Private Benjamin role in the TV version, and was nominated six other times for guest roles on such shows as Newhart, thirtysomething, Taxi and Will & Grace.

Adam Sandler
 

Actor Adam Sandler is reported to have died shortly after a snowboard accident earlier today - August 9, 2013.

The actor & novice snowboarder was vacationing at the Zermatt ski resort in Zermatt, Switzerland with family and friends. Witnesses indicate that Adam Sandler lost control of his snowboard and struck a tree at a high rate of speed.

Adam Sandler was air lifted by ski patrol teams to a local hospital, however, it is believed that the actor died instantly from the impact of the crash. The actor was wearing a helmet at the time of the accident and drugs and alcohol do not appear to have played any part in his death.

Karen Black
 

Karen Black, the prolific actress who appeared in more than 100 movies and was featured in such counterculture favorites as "Easy Rider," ''Five Easy Pieces" and "Nashville," has died. She was 74.

Known for her full lips and thick, wavy hair that seemed to change color from film to film, Black often portrayed women who were quirky, troubled or threatened. She was a prostitute who takes LSD with Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in 1969's "Easy Rider," a breakthrough that helped get her the role as a waitress who dates an upper-class dropout played by Jack Nicholson in 1970's "Five Easy Pieces." Black won an Oscar nomination and Golden Globe Award for that performance.

Cited by The New York Times as a "pathetically appealing vulgarian," Black's performance won her an Oscar nomination and Golden Globe Award. She would recall that playing Rayette really was acting: The well-read, cerebral Black, raised in a comfortable Chicago suburb, had little in common with her relatively simple-minded character.

"If you look through the eyes of Rayette, it looks nice, really beautiful, light, not heavy, not serious. A very affectionate woman who would look upon things with love, and longing," Black told Venice Magazine in 2007. "A completely uncritical person, and in that sense, a beautiful person. When (director) Bob Rafelson called me to his office to discuss the part he said, 'Karen, I'm worried you can't play this role because you're too smart.' I said 'Bob, when you call "action," I will stop thinking,' because that's how Rayette is.'"

In 1971, Black starred with Nicholson again in "Drive, He Said," which Nicholson also directed. Over the next few years, she worked with such top actors and directors as Richard Benjamin ("Portnoy's Complaint"), Robert Redford and Mia Farrow ("The Great Gatsby") and Charlton Heston ("Airport 1975"). She was nominated for a Grammy Award after writing and performing songs for "Nashville," in which she played a country singer in Robert Altman's 1975 ensemble epic. Black also starred as a jewel thief in Alfred Hitchcock's last movie, "Family Plot," released in 1976.

"We used to read each other poems and limericks and tried to catch me on my vocabulary," she later said of Hitchcock. "He once said, 'You seem very perspicacious today, Miss Black.' I said, 'Oh, you mean "keenly perceptive?" 'Yes.' So I got him this huge, gold-embossed dictionary that said 'Diction-Harry,' at the end of the shoot."

The actress would claim that her career as an A-list actress was ruined by "The Day of the Locust," a troubled 1975 production of the Nathanael West novel that brought her a Golden Globe nomination but left Black struggling to find quality roles. By the end of the '70s, she was appearing in television and in low-budget productions. Black received strong reviews in 1982 as a transsexual in Altman's "Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean." But despite working constantly over the next 30 years, she was more a cult idol than a major Hollywood star. Her credits included guest appearances on such TV series as "Law & Order" and "Party of Five" and enough horror movies, notably "Trilogy of Terror," that a punk band named itself "The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black."

Black was also a screenwriter and a playwright whose credits included the musical "Missouri Waltz" and "A View of the Heart," a one-woman show in which she starred.

oh man...I verified it with two seperate articles before I posted this. Hahahah..they got me! But I am SO glad he is alive!!!