Christa Leigh Steele-Knudslien - founder of Miss Trans America, victim of domestic violence
 

Christa Leigh Steele-Knudslien, 42, founder of the Miss Trans America and Miss Trans New England pageant, died Friday in North Adams, Mass., becoming the first known transgender homicide victim of 2018.

Her husband, Mark S. Steele-Knudslien, 47, is charged with first-degree murder in the case.

Christa was well known in the Massachusetts transgender community for her activism and helped launch the first New England Trans Pride event a decade ago, friends said. She and other advocates later started the Miss Trans New England Pageant, which brought together transgender women from across the region, said A. Vickie Boisseau, who officiated at her wedding last April.

Another longtime friend, Justin Adkins, said, “Her thing was always that transgender women are beautiful and need a venue for trans women to be seen as beautiful.”

Searched for an hour. Cant find any other stories about her life and accomplishments. The only stories I can find, at the moment, are the ones with the gruesome details of her death.

http://www.washingtonblade.com/2018/...harged-murder/

Jo Jo White
 

Boston Celtics legend Jo Jo White, who helped the franchise return to glory in the 1970s after Bill Russell’s retirement, lost his battle with cancer at age 71, the team announced on Tuesday night.

His contributions to the team’s championship legacy may have only been surpassed by the deep and lasting impact that he had in the community.

White played 10 seasons for the Celtics before finishing his career with the Golden State Warriors and Kansas City Kings, making seven straight All-Star appearances and winning two NBA titles in Boston alongside John Havlicek and Dave Cowens. The 1976 Finals MVP’s No. 10 hangs in the rafters of TD Garden, and he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame’s class of 2015.

White played four seasons at the University of Kansas and won a gold medal as a member of the U.S. men’s national team at the 1968 Summer Olympics before the Celtics drafted him ninth overall in 1969.

Also drafted by the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys and Major League Baseball’s Cincinnati Reds, White served one year in the U.S. Marine Corp Reserves before beginning his NBA career. Following his retirement in 1981, White later rejoined the Celtics as director of special projects, a role he served until his death.

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An amazing athlete. An even more amazing man. Thank you Jo Jo for everything you did and everything you were.

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee
 

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee has died. (In Mid-December 2017)

The Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ civil rights organization, released the following statement:

“We are deeply saddened by the sudden passing of San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee,” said HRC president Chad Griffin.“Mayor Lee was a tireless advocate for LGBTQ equality who worked to make San Francisco a stronger, more vibrant, and inclusive community. As the first Asian American mayor in the city’s history, he was both a trailblazer and a dedicated public servant admired by millions. Our hearts go out to his family, friends and all those grieving his loss today."

Lee was a founding member of the “Mayors Against LGBT Discrimination” coalition.

He began his career as a civil rights attorney, fighting for fair housing for low-income people and battling corruption.

According to the Office of the Mayor, San Francisco added more than 140,000 jobs and more than 17,000 homes during Lee’s tenure.

Just last week, Lee joined with Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney in penning an op-ed about the importance of rejecting licenses to discriminate against LGBTQ people.

Regarding Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, a case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court of the United States, they said, “As co-chairs of the national Mayors Against LGBT Discrimination coalition, we are proud to join more than 150 other mayors and municipalities nationwide in opposing religious exemptions that allow sexual orientation-based discrimination.”

Writer Ursula Le Guin Has Passed Away
 

Ursula K. Le Guin, Acclaimed for Her Fantasy Fiction, Is Dead at 88
By Gerald Jonas, NY Times

Ursula K. Le Guin, the immensely popular author who brought literary depth and a tough-minded feminist sensibility to science fiction and fantasy with books like “The Left Hand of Darkness” and the Earthsea series, died on Monday at her home in Portland, Ore. She was 88.

Her son, Theo Downes-Le Guin, confirmed the death. He did not specify a cause but said she had been in poor health for several months.

Ms. Le Guin embraced the standard themes of her chosen genres: sorcery and dragons, spaceships and planetary conflict. But even when her protagonists are male, they avoid the macho posturing of so many science fiction and fantasy heroes. The conflicts they face are typically rooted in a clash of cultures and resolved more by conciliation and self-sacrifice than by swordplay or space battles.

Her books have been translated into more than 40 languages and have sold millions of copies worldwide. Several, including “The Left Hand of Darkness” — set on a planet where the customary gender distinctions do not apply — have been in print for almost 50 years. The critic Harold Bloom lauded Ms. Le Guin as “a superbly imaginative creator and major stylist” who “has raised fantasy into high literature for our time.”

In addition to more than 20 novels, she was the author of a dozen books of poetry, more than 100 short stories (collected in multiple volumes), seven collections of essays, 13 books for children and five volumes of translation, including the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu and selected poems by the Chilean Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral. She also wrote a guide for writers.

“The Left Hand of Darkness,” published in 1969, takes place on a planet called Gethen, where people are neither male nor female.

Ms. Le Guin’s fictions range from young-adult adventures to wry philosophical fables. They combine compelling stories, rigorous narrative logic and a lean but lyrical style to draw readers into what she called the “inner lands” of the imagination. Such writing, she believed, could be a moral force.

“If you cannot or will not imagine the results of your actions, there’s no way you can act morally or responsibly,” she told The Guardian in an interview in 2005. “Little kids can’t do it; babies are morally monsters — completely greedy. Their imagination has to be trained into foresight and empathy.”

The writer’s “pleasant duty,” she said, is to ply the reader’s imagination with “the best and purest nourishment that it can absorb.”

She was born Ursula Kroeber in Berkeley, Calif., on Oct. 21, 1929, the youngest of four children and the only daughter of two anthropologists, Alfred L. Kroeber and Theodora Quinn Kroeber. Her father was an expert on the Native Americans of California, and her mother wrote an acclaimed book, “Ishi in Two Worlds” (1960), about the life and death of California’s “last wild Indian.”

At a young age, Ms. Le Guin immersed herself in books about mythology, among them James Frazier’s “The Golden Bough,” classic fantasies like Lord Dunsany’s “A Dreamer’s Tales,” and the science-fiction magazines of the day. But in early adolescence she lost interest in science fiction, because, she recalled, the stories “seemed to be all about hardware and soldiers: White men go forth and conquer the universe.”

She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1951, earned a master’s degree in romance literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance from Columbia University in 1952, and won a Fulbright fellowship to study in Paris. There she met and married another Fulbright scholar, Charles Le Guin, who survives her.

On their return to the United States, she abandoned her graduate studies to raise a family; the Le Guins eventually settled in Portland, where Mr. Le Guin taught history at Portland State University.

Besides her husband and son, Ms. Le Guin is survived by two daughters, Caroline and Elisabeth Le Guin; two brothers, Theodore and Clifton Kroeber; and four grandchildren.

By the early 1960s Ms. Le Guin had written five unpublished novels, mostly set in an imaginary Central European country called Orsinia. Eager to find a more welcoming market, she decided to try her hand at genre fiction.

Her first science-fiction novel, “Rocannon’s World,” came out in 1966. Two years later she published “A Wizard of Earthsea,” the first in a series about a made-up world where the practice of magic is as precise as any science, and as morally ambiguous.

The first three Earthsea books — the other two were “The Tombs of Atuan” (1971) and “The Farthest Shore” (1972) — were written, at the request of her publisher, for young adults. But their grand scale and elevated style betray no trace of writing down to an audience.

The magic of Earthsea is language-driven: Wizards gain power over people and things by knowing their “true names.” Ms. Le Guin took this discipline seriously in naming her own characters. “I must find the right name or I cannot get on with the story,” she said. “I cannot write the story if the name is wrong.”

The Earthsea series was clearly influenced by J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. But instead of a holy war between Good and Evil, Ms. Le Guin’s stories are organized around a search for “balance” among competing forces — a concept she adapted from her lifelong study of Taoist texts.

She returned to Earthsea later in her career, extending and deepening the trilogy with books like “Tehanu” (1990) and “The Other Wind” (2001), written for a general audience.

“The Left Hand of Darkness,” published in 1969, takes place on a planet called Gethen, where people are neither male nor female but assume the attributes of either sex during brief periods of reproductive fervor. Speaking with an anthropological dispassion, Ms. Le Guin later referred to her novel as a “thought experiment” designed to explore the nature of human societies.

“I eliminated gender to find out what was left,” she told The Guardian.

But there is nothing dispassionate about the relationship at the core of the book, between an androgynous native of Gethen and a human male from Earth. The book won the two major prizes in science fiction, the Hugo and Nebula awards, and is widely taught in secondary schools and colleges.

Much of Ms. Le Guin’s science fiction has a common background: a loosely knit confederation of worlds known as the Ekumen. This was founded by an ancient people who seeded humans on habitable planets throughout the galaxy — including Gethen, Earth and the twin worlds of her most ambitious novel, “The Dispossessed,” subtitled “An Ambiguous Utopia” (1974).

As the subtitle implies, “The Dispossessed” contrasts two forms of social organization: a messy but vibrant capitalist society, which oppresses its underclass, and a classless “utopia” (partly based on the ideas of the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin), which turns out to be oppressive in its own conformist way. Ms. Le Guin leaves it up to the reader to find a comfortable balance between the two.

“The Lathe of Heaven” (1971) offers a very different take on utopian ambitions. A man whose dreams can alter reality falls under the sway of a psychiatrist, who usurps this power to conjure his own vision of a perfect world, with unfortunate results.

“The Lathe of Heaven” was among the few books by Ms. Le Guin that have been adapted for film or television. There were two made-for-television versions, one on PBS in 1980 and the other on the A&E cable channel in 2002.

Among the other adaptations of her work were the 2006 Japanese animated feature “Tales From Earthsea” and a 2004 mini-series on the Sci Fi channel, “Legend of Earthsea.”

With the exception of the 1980 “Lathe of Heaven,” she had little good to say about any of them.

Ms. Le Guin always considered herself a feminist, even when genre conventions led her to center her books on male heroes. Her later works, like the additions to the Earthsea series and such Ekumen tales as “Four Ways to Forgiveness” (1995) and “The Telling” (2000), are mostly told from a female point of view.

In some of her later books, she gave in to a tendency toward didacticism, as if she were losing patience with humanity for not learning the hard lessons — about the need for balance and compassion — that her best work so astutely embodies.

At the 2014 National Book Awards, Ms. Le Guin was given the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She accepted the medal on behalf of her fellow writers of fantasy and science fiction, who, she said, had been “excluded from literature for so long” while literary honors went to the “so-called realists.”

She also urged publishers and writers not to put too much emphasis on profits.

“I have had a long career and a good one,” she said, adding, “Here at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/o...ead-at-88.html

John Mahoney
 

John Mahoney, best known for playing Martin Crane on 11 seasons of “Frasier,” has died. He was 77.

Mahoney played the father of Kelsey Grammer and David Hyde Pierce’s characters during the show’s run on NBC from 1993 to 2004. He won a SAG Award and received two Emmy and two Golden Globe nominations for his portrayal. He was also a mainstay of Chicago’s theater community.

From 2011 to 2014, he had a recurring role on “Hot in Cleveland” as Roy, the love interest of Betty White’s character, Elka. He was much praised for his performance as an anguished CEO in psychological counseling on Season 2 of HBO’s “In Treatment” in 2009.

Mahoney worked in film for more than 35 years, appearing in classics like “The American President” and “Say Anything,” along with voicing animated characters in the “Antz” and “Atlantis” films. He also had guest spots in a number of popular TV shows including “Cheers” and “3rd Rock from the Sun.”

Born Blackpool, England, the actor started his career in theater and continued to return to the stage, appearing in “Prelude to a Kiss” on Broadway and “The Outgoing Tide” and “The Birthday Party” in Chicago after “Frasier” ended.

He came to the U.S. at age 19 and taught English at Western Illinois University before entering into the entertainment industry in 1977

Nanette Fabray
 

The exuberant, indefatigable actress-singer Nanette Fabray, a Tony and Emmy winner, a star of Vincente Minnelli’s golden-age musical “The Band Wagon” and a longtime presence on television, most notably on “The Hollywood Squares,” has died. She was 97.

In MGM’s “The Band Wagon” (1953), also starring Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse and Oscar Levant, Fabray appeared in that classic film’s two most famous numbers, “That’s Entertainment” and, as one of the bratty (and bizarre) babies in high chairs, “Triplets.”

Fabray also appeared on TV comedies and drama, starring on “Westinghouse Playhouse,” created by then-husband Ranald MacDougall, and recurring as Grandma Katherine Romano on hit 1970s sitcom “One Day at a Time.” She guested on “Burke’s Law,” “The Girl From U.N.C.L.E.,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” on which she played Mary’s mother; “Love American Style,” “Maude,” “Murder, She Wrote” and “Coach.”

In her 20s, Fabray was diagnosed with hereditary hearing loss. She had four operations throughout her lifetime to restore her hearing. She also began wearing a hearing aid and speaking publicly about her disability in her 30s.

Throughout her life, Fabray continued to advocate for people with hearing disabilities. Her efforts contributed to the Americans With Disabilities Act, and she was a founding member of the National Captioning Institute, which was instrumental in passing a law requiring that all TV sets be equipped with captioning in 1994.

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Had a major crush on this woman. Thanks for the memories Nanette.

David Ogden Stiers
 

David Ogden Stiers, best known for his role as the arrogant surgeon Major Charles Emerson Winchester III on “MASH,” died Saturday. He was 75.

For his work on “MASH,” Stiers was twice Emmy nominated for outstanding supporting actor in a comedy or variety or music series, in 1981 and 1982, and he earned a third Emmy nomination for his performance in NBC miniseries “The First Olympics: Athens 1896” as William Milligan Sloane, the founder of the U.S. Olympic Committee.

The actor, with his educated, resonant intonations — though he did not share Major Winchester’s Boston Brahmin accent — was much in demand for narration and voiceover work, and for efforts as the narrator and as of Disney’s enormous hit animated film “Beauty and the Beast,” he shared a Grammy win for best recording for children and another nomination for album of the year.

He voiced Dr. Jumba Jookiba, the evil genius who created Stitch, in 2002’s “Lilo & Stitch” and various spinoffs; once he became part of the Disney family, Stiers went on to do voicework on a large number of movies, made for TV or video content and videogames.

In addition to serving as narrator and as the voice of Cogsworth in “Beauty and the Beast” in 1991, he voiced Governor Ratcliffe and Wiggins in Disney’s 1995 animated effort “Pocahontas” and voiced the Archdeacon in Disney’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” He also contributed the voice of the grandfather for the English-language version of Hayao Miyazaki’s 1992 animation “Porco Rosso” and of Kamaji in Miyazki’s classic “Spirited Away” in 2001. From 2011-15 he recurred on Cartoon Network’s “Regular Show.”

Stiers was also known for the eight Perry Mason TV movies he made between 1986-88 in which his prosecuting attorney invariably lost to Raymond Burr’s Mason, and more recently he had recurred on the USA Network series “The Dead Zone” from 2002-07 as the Rev. Eugene Purdy, the chief antagonist to star Anthony Michael Hall’s Johnny Smith.

In 2009, the actor revealed publicly that he was gay. He told ABC News at the time that he had hidden his sexuality for a long time because so much of his income had been derived from family-friendly programming, and coming out thus might have had repercussions in the past.

http://variety.com/2018/tv/news/davi...sh-1202716860/

Brown v Board of Education (Topeka, Kansas 1953)
 

Linda Brown <<<<<--- the student at the center of Brown v Board of Education, passed away yesterday. She was 75 years old.. Her landmark civil rights case was fought for and won by Thurgood Marshall, putting an end to racial segregation in public schools, during the Jim Crow Era (1877 - mid-1960s).


https://media.npr.org/assets/img/201...7-s300-c85.jpg

(Linda and her dad, in photo above, courtesy of NPR).


LINK to NPR article: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-...education-dies

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela
 

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela Is Dead at 81; Fought Apartheid
By Alan Cowell

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, whose hallowed place in the pantheon of South Africa’s liberators was eroded by scandal over corruption, kidnapping, murder and the implosion of her fabled marriage to Nelson Mandela, died early Monday in Johannesburg. She was 81.

Her death, at the Netcare Milpark Hospital, was announced by her spokesman, Victor Dlamini. He said in a statement that she died “after a long illness, for which she had been in and out of hospital since the start of the year.”

The South African Broadcasting Corporation said she was admitted to the hospital over the weekend complaining of the flu after she attended a church service on Friday. She had been treated for diabetes and underwent major surgeries as her health began failing over the last several years.

Charming, intelligent, complex, fiery and eloquent, Ms. Madikizela-Mandela (Madikizela was her surname at birth) was inevitably known to most of the world through her marriage to the revered Mr. Mandela. It was a bond that endured ambiguously: She derived a vaunted status from their shared struggle, yet she chafed at being defined by him.

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018...-master675.jpg
Ms. Madikizela-Mandela was cheered by supporters after appearing in court in Krugersdorp, South Africa, in 1986. She commanded a natural constituency of her own among South Africa’s poor and dispossessed. Credit Associated Press

Ms. Madikizela-Mandela commanded a natural constituency of her own among South Africa’s poor and dispossessed, and the post-apartheid leaders who followed Mr. Mandela could never ignore her appeal to a broad segment of society. In April 2016, the government of President Jacob G. Zuma gave Ms. Madikizela-Mandela one of the country’s highest honors: the Order of Luthuli, given, in part, for contributions to the struggle for democracy.

Ms. Madikizela-Mandela retained a political presence as a member of Parliament, representing the dominant African National Congress, and she insisted on a kind of primacy in Mr. Mandela’s life, no matter their estrangement.

“Nobody knows him better than I do,” she told a British interviewer in 2013.

Increasingly, though, Ms. Madikizela-Mandela resented the notion that her anti-apartheid credentials had been eclipsed by her husband’s global stature and celebrity, and she struggled in vain in later years to be regarded again as the “mother of the nation,” a sobriquet acquired during the long years of Mr. Mandela’s imprisonment. She insisted that her contribution had been wrongly depicted as a pale shadow of his.

“I am not Mandela’s product,” she told an interviewer. “I am the product of the masses of my country and the product of my enemy” — references to South Africa’s white rulers under apartheid and to her burning hatred of them, rooted in her own years of mistreatment, incarceration and banishment.

Conduit to Her Husband

While Mr. Mandela was held at the Robben Island penal settlement, off Cape Town, where he spent most of his 27 years in jail, Ms. Madikizela-Mandela acted as the main conduit to his followers, who hungered for every clue to his thinking and well-being. The flow of information was meager, however: Her visits there were rare, and she was never allowed physical contact with him.

In time, her reputation became scarred by accusations of extreme brutality toward suspected turncoats, misbehavior and indiscretion in her private life, and a radicalism that seemed at odds with Mr. Mandela’s quest for racial inclusiveness.

She nevertheless sought to remain in his orbit. She was at his side, brandishing a victor’s clenched fist salute, when he was finally released from prison in February 1990.

At his funeral, in December 2013, she appeared by his coffin in mourning black — positioning herself almost as if she were the grieving first lady — even though Mr. Mandela had married Graça Machel, the widow of the former Mozambican president Samora Machel, in 1998, on his 80th birthday, six years after separating from Ms. Madikizela-Mandela and two years after their divorce. It was Mr. Mandela’s third marriage.

In 2016, Ms. Madikizela-Mandela began legal efforts to secure the ownership of Mr. Mandela’s home in his ancestral village of Qunu. She contended that their marriage had never been lawfully dissolved and that she was therefore entitled to the house, which Mr. Mandela had bequeathed to his descendants. High Court judges rejected that argument in April. After learning that she had lost the case, she was hospitalized.

Her lawyers said she would appeal the High Court judgment.

‘She Who Must Endure’

Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela was born to a noble family of the Xhosa-speaking Pondo tribe in Transkei. Her first name, Nomzamo, means “she who must endure trials.”

Her birth date was Sept. 26, 1936, according to the Nelson Mandela Foundation and many other sources, although earlier accounts gave the year as 1934.

Her father, Columbus, was a senior official in the so-called homeland of Transkei, according to South African History Online, an unofficial archive, which described her as the fourth of eight children. (Other accounts say her family was larger.) Her mother, Gertrude, was a teacher who died when Winnie was 8, the archive said.

As a barefoot child she tended cattle and learned to make do with very little, in marked contrast to her later years of free-spending ostentation. She attended a Methodist mission school and then the Hofmeyr School of Social Work in Johannesburg, where she befriended Adelaide Tsukudu, the future wife of Oliver Tambo, a law partner of Mr. Mandela’s who went on to lead the A.N.C. in exile. She turned down a scholarship in the United States, preferring to remain in South Africa as the first black social worker at the Baragwanath hospital in Soweto.

One day in 1957, when she was waiting at a bus stop, Nelson Mandela drove past. “I was struck by her beauty,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom.” Some weeks later, he recalled, “I was at the office when I popped in to see Oliver and there was this same young woman.”

Mr. Mandela, approaching 40 and the father of three, declared on their first date that he would marry her. Soon he separated from his first wife, Evelyn Ntoko Mase, a nurse, to marry Ms. Madikizela-Mandela on June 14, 1958.

Ms. Madikizela-Mandela was thrust into the limelight in 1964 when her husband was sentenced to life in prison on charges of treason. She was officially “banned” under draconian restrictions intended to make her a nonperson, unable to work, socialize, move freely or be quoted in the South African news media, even as she raised their two daughters, Zenani and Zindziswa.

In a crackdown in May 1969, five years after her husband was sent to prison, she was arrested and held for 17 months, 13 in solitary confinement. She was beaten and tortured. The experience, she wrote, was “what changed me, what brutalized me so much that I knew what it is to hate.”

After blacks rioted in the segregated Johannesburg township of Soweto in 1976, Ms. Madikizela-Mandela was again imprisoned without trial, this time for five months. She was then banished to a bleak township outside the profoundly conservative white town of Brandfort, in the Orange Free State.

“I am a living symbol of whatever is happening in the country,” she wrote in “Part of My Soul Went With Him,” a memoir published in 1984 and printed around the world. “I am a living symbol of the white man’s fear. I never realized how deeply embedded this fear is until I came to Brandfort.”

Contrary to the authorities’ intentions, her cramped home became a place of pilgrimage for diplomats and prominent sympathizers, as well as foreign journalists seeking interviews.

Ms. Madikizela-Mandela cherished conversation with outsiders and word of the world beyond her confines. She scorned many of her restrictions, using whites-only public phones and ignoring the segregated counters at the local liquor store when she ordered Champagne — gestures that stunned the area’s whites.

Banishment Took Toll

Still, Ms. Madikizela-Mandela’s exclusion from what passed as a normal life in South Africa took a toll, and she began to drink heavily. During her banishment, moreover, her land changed. Beginning in late 1984, young protesters challenged the authorities with increasing audacity. The unrest spread, prompting the white rulers to acknowledge what they called a “revolutionary climate” and declare a state of emergency.

When Ms. Madikizela-Mandela returned to her home in Soweto in 1985, breaking her banning orders, it was as a far more bellicose figure, determined to assume leadership of what became the decisive and most violent phase of the struggle. As she saw it, her role was to stiffen the confrontation with the authorities.

The tactics were harsh.

“Together, hand in hand, with our boxes of matches and our necklaces, we will liberate this country,” she told a rally in April 1986. She was referring to “necklacing,” a form of sometimes arbitrary execution by fire using a gas-soaked tire around a supposed traitor’s neck, and it shocked an older generation of anti-apartheid campaigners. But her severity aligned her with the young township radicals who enforced commitment to the struggle.

In the late 1980s, Ms. Madikizela-Mandela allowed the outbuildings around her residence in Soweto to be used by the so-called Mandela United Football Club, a vigilante gang that claimed to be her bodyguard. It terrorized Soweto, inviting infamy and prosecution.

In 1991 she was convicted of ordering the 1988 kidnapping of four youths in Soweto. The body of one, a 14-year-old named James Moeketsi Seipei — nicknamed Stompie, a slang word for a cigarette butt, reflecting his diminutive stature — was found with his throat cut.

Ms. Madikizela-Mandela’s chief bodyguard was convicted of murder. She was sentenced to six years for kidnapping, but South Africa’s highest appeals court reduced her punishment to fines and a suspended one-year term.

By then her life had begun to unravel. The United Democratic Front, an umbrella group of organizations fighting apartheid and linked to the A.N.C., expelled her. In April 1992, Mr. Mandela, midway through settlement talks with President F. W. de Klerk of South Africa, announced that he and his wife were separating. (She dismissed suggestions that she had wanted to be known by the title “first lady.” “I am not the sort of person to carry beautiful flowers and be an ornament to everyone,” she said.)

Two years later, Mr. Mandela was elected president and offered her a minor job as the deputy minister of arts, culture, science and technology. But after allegations of influence peddling, bribetaking and misuse of government funds, she was forced from office. In 1996, Mr. Mandela ended their 38-year marriage, testifying in court that his wife was having an affair with a colleague.

Only in 1997, at the behest of Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu at South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, did Ms. Madikizela-Mandela offer an apology for the events of the late 1980s. “Things went horribly wrong,” she said, adding, “For that I am deeply sorry.”

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018...-3-blog427.jpg
Ms. Madikizela-Mandela at a 2009 gathering to honor her former husband, who died four years later. Credit Alexander Joe/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


Yet the catalog of missteps continued, cast into sharp relief by her haughty dismissiveness toward her accusers. In 2003 she was convicted of using her position as president of the A.N.C. Women’s League to obtain fraudulent loans; she was sentenced to five years in prison. But her sentence was again suspended on appeal, with a judge finding that she had not gained personally from the transactions.

To the end, Ms. Madikizela-Mandela remained a polarizing figure in South Africa, admired by loyalists who were prepared to focus on her contribution to ending apartheid, vilified by critics who foremost saw her flaws. Few could ignore her unsettling contradictions, however.

“While there is something of a historical revisionism happening in some quarters of our nation these days that brands Nelson Mandela’s second wife a revolutionary and heroic figure,” the columnist Verashni Pillay wrote in the South African newspaper The Mail and Guardian, “it doesn’t take that much digging to remember the truly awful things she has been responsible for.”

Joseph R. Gregory contributed reporting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/w...dela-dead.html

R.I.P my sister
 

I know I have been absent from BFP. It has been a horrible year. My mother passed in September and my sister passed Thursday. I have now facilitated the death of my parents and only sibling through hospice. I will probably not be active for a while because I am just emotionally shot. I have not forgotten my friends here just with the deaths and being the sole parent and helping my oldest in her first year of college and going through the college process with little help from my ex, and working, I can’t do much more than check in. Thanks for your understanding.

I'm so sorry, prof. Don't forget the Listening thread if venting would help.

New York lawyer David Buckel - well-known for his work on behalf of the LGBT community, as well as with environmental groups - immolated himself in Brooklyn's Prospect Park in protest against the use of fossil fuels. Buckel had been the lead lawyer in the case of Brandon Teena And served as the Marriage Project Director and Senior Counsel for Lambda Legal.

Link

RIP Former First Lady
 

https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/17/polit...ies/index.html



Barbara Bush, the matriarch of a Republican political dynasty and a first lady who elevated the cause of literacy, died Tuesday, according to a statement from her husband's office. She was 92.

Only the second woman in American history to have had a husband and a son elected President (Abigail Adams was the first), Bush was seen as a plainspoken public figure who was instantly recognizable with her signature white hair and pearl necklaces and earrings. She became a major political figure as her husband, George H.W. Bush, rose to become vice president and president. After they left the White House, she was a potent spokeswoman for two of her sons -- George W. and Jeb -- as they campaigned for office.
'The enforcer' -- how Barbara Bush became the matriarch of the Republican Party
'The enforcer' -- how Barbara Bush became the matriarch of the Republican Party
The mother of six children -- one of whom, a daughter, Robin, died as a child from leukemia -- Barbara Bush raised her fast-growing family in the 1950s and '60s amid the post-war boom of Texas and the whirl of politics that consumed her husband.
She was at his side during his nearly 30-year political career. He was a US representative for Texas, UN ambassador, Republican Party chairman, ambassador to China and CIA director. He then became Ronald Reagan's vice president for two terms and won election to the White House in 1988. He left office in 1993 after losing a re-election bid to Bill Clinton.
Quick-witted with a sharp tongue, the feisty Barbara Bush was a fierce defender of her husband and an astute adviser.
As first lady, her principal persona as a devoted wife and mother contrasted in many ways with her peer and predecessor, Nancy Reagan, and her younger successor, Hillary Clinton, both of whom were seen as more intimately involved in their husbands' presidencies.
Still, Barbara Bush promoted women's rights, and her strong personal views sometimes surfaced publicly and raised eyebrows -- especially when they clashed with Republican Party politics. For instance, she once said as her husband ran for president that abortion should not be politicized.
Barbara Bush in failing health, won't seek further treatment
Barbara Bush in failing health, won't seek further treatment
She also was not shy about the possibility of a female president, disarming a Wellesley College audience at a 1990 appearance protested by some on campus who questioned her credentials to address female graduates aiming for the workplace.
"Somewhere out in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow my footsteps and preside over the White House as the president's spouse.
"I wish him well," she said.
Childhood and family life
Barbara Pierce was born June 8, 1925, in New York and raised in the upscale town of Rye. She attended a prestigious boarding school in South Carolina, where she met her future husband at a school dance when she was only 16 and he was a year older. A year and a half and countless love letters later, the two were engaged just before George Bush enlisted in the Navy and went off to fight in World War II.
Bush, who was the youngest fighter pilot in the Navy at the time, would return home a war hero, after being shot down by the Japanese. He had flown 58 combat missions and received the Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery. By that time, Barbara had dropped out of Smith College and the pair were married in January 1945.
They raised their family mainly in Texas, where George H.W. Bush, the son of a US senator, was in the oil business and later entered politics.
Barbara Bush's dedication to keeping order at home earned her the nickname "the enforcer."
Barbara Bush Fast Facts
Barbara Bush Fast Facts
"We were rambunctious a lot, pretty independent-minded kids, and, you know, she had her hands. Dad, of course, was available, but he was a busy guy. And he was on the road a lot in his businesses and obviously on the road a lot when he was campaigning. And so Mother was there to maintain order and discipline. She was the sergeant," George W. Bush told CNN in 2016.
With her husband as vice president in the 1980s, Bush adopted literacy as a cause, raising awareness and eventually launching the nonprofit Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy. After George H.W. Bush's presidency, he and Barbara raised more than $1 billion for literacy and cancer charities.
"I chose literacy because I honestly believe that if more people could read, write, and comprehend, we would be that much closer to solving so many of the problems that plague our nation and our society," she said.
A writer, her books include an autobiography and one about post-White House life. Her children's book about their dog, Millie, and her puppies written during her White House years was, as were her other books, a bestseller.
On the campaign trail
In 2001, when George W. Bush took office, Barbara Bush became the only woman in American history to live to see her husband and son elected president.
She campaigned for son George W. and fiercely defended him from critics after he became president.
Asked in a 2013 interview about the prospect that her younger son, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, might mount a White House campaign in 2016, Bush quipped in her dry fashion, "We've had enough Bushes."
But when Jeb decided to run, she changed her mind and campaigned for him, appearing in a video for Jeb Bush's ultimately unsuccessful campaign, saying, "I think he'll be a great president."
She also was outspoken about Donald Trump. In one of her last interviews, the former first lady said in early 2016 she was "sick" of Trump, who belittled her son repeatedly during the 2016 GOP primary campaign, adding that she doesn't "understand why people are for him."
"I'm a woman," she added. "I'm not crazy about what he says about women."
Most recently, Bush published a note in the spring edition of Smith College's alumnae magazine, where she declared: "I am still old and still in love with the man I married 72 years ago."
The college awarded Bush an honorary degree in 1989.
Bush battled health problems for much of her later life. She was diagnosed in 1988 with Graves' disease, an autoimmune disease that commonly affects the thyroid. She had open-heart surgery in 2009 and in 2008 underwent surgery for a perforated ulcer.
In her final years, she was diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, better known as COPD, as well as congestive heart failure. But, along with her husband, she kept an active public schedule, raising money for charity.
Bush is survived by her husband, George H.W.; sons George W., Neil, Marvin and Jeb; daughter, Dorothy Bush Koch; and 17 grandchildren.
CNN's Brandon Griggs and Kate Bennett contributed to this story.

RIP Anthony Bourdain

LINK: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/06/0...dain-dead.html

Charlotte Rae
 

Charlotte Rae, the Emmy and Tony-nominated actress who entertained TV audiences as Mrs. Garrett on "The Facts of Life" and "Diff'rent Strokes," died Sunday at the age of 92.

Born Charlotte Rae Lubotsky in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Rae got her start doing theater and radio (where she was told to drop her last name). She broke into playing Sylvia Schnauser, the wife of Al Lewis’ Officer Leo Schnauser on Car 54, Where Are You? While she earned Tony nominations Pickwick, Morning Noon and Night, and an Emmy nom (Queen of the Stardust Ballroom), it wasn’t until 1978 when Norman Lear, a longtime fan, cast her in Diff’rent Strokes, that Rae’s career took off.

Rae played the kooky but kind housekeeper Edna Garrett, unmissable thanks to that mound of bright orange hair, on Diff’rent Strokes, and when she became a popular breakout character, Rae herself proposed the spin-off. That spin-off became The Facts of Life, a sitcom about a girls’ boarding school and their (once again) kooky and kind house mother. Rae’s Mrs. Garrett (or Mrs. G, as Nancy McKeon’s Jo liked to call her) helped guide the girls through every very special episode theme imaginable, from depression to dating, AIDS to alcohol. Rae left the show in 1986 for health reasons, and though Cloris Leachman stepped in as Mrs. Garrett’s sister, the show was canceled two years later.

Rae went on to guest star on TV shows like ER, Pretty Little Liars, Sisters, and The King of Queens, and appeared in movies such as Don’t Mess with the Zohan and Tom and Jerry: The Movie. Her final regular gig was voicing “Nanny” in the animated 101 Dalmations: The Series, which aired from 1997-98.

As much as she was beloved by TV watchers throughout the ‘80s, she remained associated with the beloved character of Mrs. Garrett thanks to reruns. In 2011, The Facts of Life cast reunited for the TV Land Awards, where she took home the Pop Icon award. That night, her Facts of Life costars Kim Fields and Nancy McKeon gave speeches in her honor. , they again got together for the closing night of PaleyFest in Los Angeles.