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TheZookie007

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Re: The R.I.P. Thread
« Reply #1710 on: June 08, 2018, 10:13:46 AM »
The travel host Anthony Bourdain, whose memoir Kitchen Confidential about the dark corners of New York’s restaurants started a career in television, died on Friday at 61.

For the past several years, Mr. Bourdain hosted the show Parts Unknown on CNN and was working on an episode in Strasbourg, France, when he died, the network said Friday morning. He killed himself in a hotel room, the network said.

“It is with extraordinary sadness we can confirm the death of our friend and colleague,” CNN said in a statement.

A spokesperson for the United States Embassy in Paris also confirmed his death. “We can confirm the death of Anthony Bourdain in the Haute-Rhin department of France,” the Embassy said. “We extend our sincere condolences to friends and family. We stand ready to provide appropriate consular services. Out of respect for the family, we have no further comment.”

In everything he did, Mr. Bourdain cultivated a renegade style and bad-boy persona.

For decades, he worked 13-hour days as a line cook in restaurants in New York and the Northeast before he became executive chef in the 1990s at Brasserie Les Halles, serving steak frites and onion soup in Lower Manhattan. He had been the chef there for eight years when he sent an unsolicited article to The New Yorker about the underbelly of the restaurant world and its deceptions.

To his surprise, the magazine accepted it and ran it — catching the attention of book editors. It resulted in Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, a memoir that elevated Mr. Bourdain to a ce le brity chef and a new career on TV. Before he joined CNN in 2012, he spent eight seasons as the globe-trotting host of No Reservations on the Travel Channel, highlighting obscure cuisine and unknown restaurants.

Mr. Bourdain became an instant hero to a certain breed of professional cooks and restaurant goers when Kitchen Confidential hit the best-seller lists in 2000.

He is largely credited for defining an era of line cooks as warriors, exposing a kitchen culture in which drugs, [...] and long, brutal hours on the line in professional kitchens were both a badge of honor and a curse....

No Reservations largely focused on food and Mr. Bourdain himself. But on Parts Unknown, he turned the lens around, delving into different countries around the world and the people who lived in them. He explored politics and history with locals, often over plates of food and drinks.

Mr. Bourdain also famously appeared with President Barack Obama on an episode of Parts Unknown in Vietnam in 2016. Over cold beers, grilled pork and noodles, they discussed Vietnamese-American relations, Mr. Obama’s final months in office and fatherhood.

Ce le brit ies in the food and entertainment worlds expressed deep shock and disbelief Friday morning. Nigella Lawson, the British cookbook author and television personality, tweeted, “Heartbroken to hear about Tony Bourdain’s death. Unbearable for his family and girlfriend. Am going off twitter for a while.”

Michael Symon, the chef and host of ABC's The Chew, tweeted that he was in shock. Other ce le brit ies ranging from the journalist Megyn Kelly to the musician Robbie Robertson expressed grief. Ana Navarro, a Republican strategist and commentator on CNN, recalled the excellent travel advice he gave her.

“When I traveled to some exotic place I’d not been before — the last were Beirut and Amman — I’d text Bourdain & ask where I should eat. He gave the best, most fun recommendations. I’d like to think he’s scouting out the best watering holes and places to eat in heaven, right now.”
« Last Edit: June 08, 2018, 10:15:30 AM by TheZookie007 »
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rtpoe

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Re: The R.I.P. Thread
« Reply #1711 on: June 22, 2018, 10:54:52 PM »
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER (1950 – 2018)

Irving Charles Krauthammer was born in Manhattan on March 13, 1950, to parents who were Jewish refugees from Europe. Five years later, the family moved to Montreal. Charles studied political science and economics at McGill University, and graduated first in his class in 1970.

Switching careers, he went to Harvard to study medicine. That discipline, he later wrote, “promised not only moral certainty, but intellectual certainty, a hardness to truth, something not to be found in the universe of politics.”

A diving accident there snapped his spinal cord and left him a quadriplegic, but didn’t stop his studies. Focusing on psychiatry, he completed his studies on time, and eventually became the chief resident of the psychiatric consultation service at Massachusetts General Hospital. a professor with whom he had done important research on bipolar disorder was appointed to a mental health agency created by President Jimmy Carter. Krauthammer went, too.

That Washington connection evidently reignited his interest in politics. He worked as a speechwriter for Walter Mondale, and found his true calling as a writer. He joined the staff of the New Republic in 1981, received a National Magazine Award in 1984 and joined the Washington Post the next year.

In 1984, he coined the term “the Reagan Doctrine” to describe “overt and unashamed American support for anti-Communist revolution” in the form of proxy wars from Nicaragua to Angola. After the fall of the Soviet Union, he was credited with popularizing the phrase “unipolar moment” in commentaries that advocated solidifying American hegemony in an era when no other power came close to matching the United States in might.

His arguments found favor with the growing tide of neoconservatives in the GOP and saw their most intense expression during the first term of the Bush administration.

Yet Dr. Krauthammer, whom Bush named to the President’s Council on Bioethics, was never completely a partisan warrior. He differed from many cultural conservatives by favoring legalized abortion and stem-cell research and abhorred the idea of “intelligent design,” calling it “a fraud,” “today’s tarted-up version of creationism.”

He scolded the tea party, a loud minority within the GOP that tried to force its way legislatively with government shutdowns, as the “suicide caucus.” It was one thing to be a “blocking element” in the minority, he said, but their tactics were no way to govern.

Dr. Krauthammer was apoplectic about the rise and election of President Trump, calling him a “moral disgrace” for his initial refusal to fully condemn a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville and a walking “systemic stress test.”

"I used to think Trump was an 11-year-old, an undeveloped schoolyard bully," he wrote in August 2016, around the time Trump officially became the Republican nominee. "I was off by about 10 years. His needs are more primitive, an infantile hunger for approval and praise, a craving that can never be satisfied. He lives in a cocoon of solipsism where the world outside himself has value — indeed exists — only insofar as it sustains and inflates him."

Outside of his political thinking, he was chairman of Pro Musica Hebraica, a group that revives largely forgotten Jewish classical music on the concert stage. He was also noted for his love of baseball – to the point where the Washington Nationals honored him with a moment of silence before the start of their game Thursday after the news of his death broke. Chess was another passion of his.

“…but at our club, when you lose with a blunder that instantly illuminates the virtues of assisted suicide, we have a cure. Rack 'em up again. Like pool. A new game, right away. We play fast, very fast, so that memories can be erased and defeats immediately avenged. I try to explain to friends that we do not sit in overstuffed chairs smoking pipes in five-hour games. We play like the vagrants in the park--at high speed with clocks ticking so that thinking more than 10 or 20 seconds can be a fatal extravagance. In speed (“blitz”') chess, you've got 5 or 10 minutes to play your entire game. Some Mondays we get in a dozen games each. No time to recriminate, let alone ruminate.”

http://townhall.com/columnists/charleskrauthammer/2002/12/27/the-pariah-chess-club-n1010830

Charles was one of those vanishingly rare Washingtonians who could be both likable and logical. This is not easy in a town where the local industry, politics — unlike, say, engineering; get things wrong and the bridges buckle — thrives on unrefuted errors. – George Will

“He had great lucidity of thought and was an extremely pungent polemicist,” Jacob Heilbrunn said of Dr. Krauthammer. “Those traits manifested themselves once more in his searing denunciations of Donald Trump as a phony. They showed that Krauthammer wasn’t simply a reflexive, unthinking conservative who was peddling the party line. He had real discernment and independence. At bottom, he was an intellectual, not just a journalist, with real literary flair and style and insight.”

“History is shaped by its battle of ideas, and I wanted to be in the arena,” Dr. Krauthammer once said, “not because I want to fight, but because some things need to be said. And some things need to be defended.”




 
rtpoe

The last fling of winter is over ...  The earth, the soil itself, has a dreaming quality about it.  It is warm now to the touch; it has come alive; it hides secrets that in a moment, in a little while, it will tell.
-  Donald Culross Peattie

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TheZookie007

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Re: The R.I.P. Thread
« Reply #1712 on: June 28, 2018, 04:06:39 AM »
Michael and Janet's dad Joseph Jackson, died after fighting pancreatic cancer. He was 89.
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solvegas

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Re: The R.I.P. Thread
« Reply #1713 on: June 28, 2018, 04:21:19 AM »
^ Say what you will about him, especially in the later scandal tinged life of the last two decades, he fully recognized the inherent talent of his family and capitalized on it and escaped poverty from Gary, Indiana, to great material success back in the 60's.

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TheZookie007

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Re: The R.I.P. Thread
« Reply #1714 on: June 29, 2018, 05:39:23 PM »
^ Say what you will about him, especially in the later scandal tinged life of the last two decades, he fully recognized the inherent talent of his family and capitalized on it and escaped poverty from Gary, Indiana, to great material success back in the 60's.

I wholly agree. To go from such grinding poverty to helping to create the world's greatest entertainer, is an amazing feat.
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rtpoe

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Re: The R.I.P. Thread
« Reply #1715 on: July 02, 2018, 07:11:07 PM »
HARLAN ELLISON (1934-2018)

https://www.cleveland.com/tv-blog/index.ssf/2018/06/harlan_ellison_fiery_and_brilliant_writer_from_cleveland_dead_at_84.html

"Harlan uses his gifts for colorful and variegated invective on those who irritate him--intrusive fans, obdurate editors, callous publishers, offensive strangers.  Little real harm is done, but it is particularly hard on editors who are young women, who have not been hardened to auctorial peculiarities.  He can reduce them to tears in three minutes. The result is that many editorial staffs and many Hollywood people too (for Harlan is not just a science fiction writer--is is a *writer* in the fullest sense of the word) are reluctant to deal with him.  What's more, he is so colorful and his personality sticks out so far in all directions that many people take pleasure in saying malicious things about him. 

This is too bad, for two reasons.  In the first place, he is (in my opinion) one of the best writers in the world, far more skilled at the art than I am.  It is simply terrible that he should be constantly embroiled and enmeshed in matters which really have nothing to do with his writing and which slow him down tragically.

Second, Harlan is not the kind of person he seems to be.  He takes a perverse pleasure in showing the worst side of himself, but if you ignore that and work your way past his porcupine spines (even though it leaves you bleeding) you will find underneath a warm, loving guy who would give you the blood out of his veins if the thought that would help.

Isaac Asimov

rtpoe

The last fling of winter is over ...  The earth, the soil itself, has a dreaming quality about it.  It is warm now to the touch; it has come alive; it hides secrets that in a moment, in a little while, it will tell.
-  Donald Culross Peattie

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rtpoe

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Re: The R.I.P. Thread
« Reply #1716 on: July 06, 2018, 09:59:36 PM »
CLAUDE LANZMANN (1925-2018)

If you were going to make one movie that would earn you cinematic immortality, what would it be?

Would it be a grand epic costume drama? A slapstick romantic comedy? An arthouse film? An action-adventure flick that would launch a franchise?

Or would it be the most important documentary ever?

Lanzmann was born in in Bois-Colombes, a Paris suburb, into a family of non-practicing Jews. When France fell to German occupation, the family went into hiding at a farm in Auvergne. At the age of 17, he joined the French Resistance as a member of a Communist group. While he continued his schooling using forged papers, Lanzmann served as a machine-gunner in attacks on German convoys.

Following the war, Lanzmann studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. After a stint as a teacher in Berlin, he returned to Paris, where he soon got to know the major intellectual figures of the time, including Sartre and de Beauvoir.

Somewhere along the way, he became a filmmaker. His first work, a 1973 documentary about life in Israel, got him a commission from that country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Could he put together a two-hour (or so) documentary on The Holocaust?

He decided, he wrote in his autobiography, The Patagonian Hare (2009), that "the subject of the film would be death itself, death rather than survival . . . For 12 years I tried to stare relentlessly into the black sun of the Shoah." The term means "catastrophe" in Hebrew and is often used as a name for the Holocaust.

In an obsessive search for witnesses, Mr. Lanzmann tracked down some of the last surviving members of the Sonderkommandos, groups of Jewish prisoners ordered to assist in the arrival and disposal of victims for the gas chambers and crematoriums. And he was persistent in seeking interviews with former Nazis. He initially approached his subjects directly, telling them who he was and what he was working on. All refused. He resorted to hidden cameras, changing his name, saying he was just a scholar doing research, and telling his interviewees that he wouldn't identify them in the finished film (he did).

Six years later, he had collected over 350 hours of film. He spent five more years editing it down to 563 minutes (nearly nine and a half hours) of brutally banal interviews.

Quote
A: You see, once the gas was poured in, it worked like this: It rose from the ground upwards. And in the terrible struggle that followed - because it was a struggle - the lights were switched off in the gas chambers. It was dark, no one could see, so the strongest people tried to climb higher. Because they probably realized that the higher they got, the more air there was. They could breathe better. That caused the struggle. Secondly, most people tried to push their way to the door. It was psychological; they knew where the door was; maybe they could force their way out. It was instinctive, a death struggle. Which is why children and weaker people and the aged always wound up at the bottom. The strongest were on top. Because in the death struggle, a father didn't realize his son lay beneath him.

Q. And when the doors were opened?

A. They fell out. People fell out like blocks of stone, like rocks falling out of a truck.

Shoah was released in 1985. Lanzmann donated his unused footage to The Holocaust Museum, and further edited it down to more endurable, stand-alone films.

Mr. Lanzmann was often critical of Holocaust films such as Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, which he described as "a kitschy melodrama" in which "the extermination is a setting." Among his chief complaints of the Spielberg film was its ending — a relatively happy one in which survivors placed pebbles on the grave of Schindler, who was credited with saving the lives of 1,200 Jews.

For Mr. Lanzmann, the scene suggested a closure and finality that never truly existed. "The last image of Shoah is different," he wrote in a column for the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad. "It is a train which rides and never stops. It says that the Holocaust has no ending."

Quote
A. That was happening to my countrymen, and I realized that my life had become meaningless. (His eyes fill with tears.) Why go on living? For what? So I went into the gas chamber with them, resolved to die. With them. Suddenly, some who recognized me came up to me. . . . A small group of women approached. They looked at me and said, right there in the gas chamber . . .

Q. You were inside the gas chamber?

A. Yes. One of them said: "So you want to die. But that's senseless. Your death won't give us back our lives. That's no way. You must get out of here alive, you must bear witness to our suffering and to the injustice done to us."

And that is the final message of this extraordinary film. It is not a documentary, not journalism, not propaganda, not political. It is an act of witness. In it, Claude Lanzmann celebrates the priceless gift that sets man apart from animals and makes us human, and gives us hope: the ability for one generation to tell the next what it has learned. - Roger Ebert
rtpoe

The last fling of winter is over ...  The earth, the soil itself, has a dreaming quality about it.  It is warm now to the touch; it has come alive; it hides secrets that in a moment, in a little while, it will tell.
-  Donald Culross Peattie

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TheZookie007

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Re: The R.I.P. Thread
« Reply #1717 on: August 06, 2018, 03:57:57 AM »
Thank you rtpoe for making me aware of M. Lanzmann and his very important work. As we are once again confronted with the banality of evil, his documentary films are more important than ever.

A slight change of pace towards some of the most memorable (albeit always covered-up) bosoms of the 1970s:

Entertainment Weekly: "Charlotte Rae, Mrs. Garrett on Facts of Life and Diff’rent Strokes, dies at 92"

Charlotte Rae, best known as wise and lovable house mother Mrs. Garrett on The Facts of Life, died Sunday at her home in Los Angeles, representatives for the actress confirmed. She was 92.

Rae revealed she’d been diagnosed with bone cancer at the end of April 2017. “Last Monday, I found out I have bone cancer,” she said in a statement. “About seven years ago, I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer — which is a miracle that they found it because usually, it’s too late. My mother, sister, and my uncle died of pancreatic cancer. After six months of chemotherapy, I was cancer-free. I lost my hair, but I had beautiful wigs. Nobody ever knew. So now, at the age of 91, I have to make up my mind. I’m not in any pain right now. I’m feeling so terrific and so glad to be above ground. Now I have to figure out whether I want to go have treatment again or opt for life.”

She continued to share her decision, “I love life. I’ve had a wonderful one already … I’ve had a great life, but I have so many wonderful things happening. I’d like to choose life. I’m grateful for the life I’ve already had.”

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 television playing Sylvia Schnauser, the wife of Al Lewis’ Officer Leo Schnauser on Car 54, Where Are You? While she earned Tony nominations [for] 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. For the show’s 35th anniversary in 2014, they again got together for the closing night of PaleyFest in Los Angeles.

Rae shared many of her Hollywood experiences — including 44 years of sobriety and discovering that her husband, John Strauss, was bisexual — in her memoir, The Facts of My Life, released in 2015.

In her April 2017 statement, Rae also said, “At 91, every day is a birthday. [In my book] I want to tell everybody to celebrate every day, to savor the day and be good to yourself, love yourself, and then you can be good to others and be of service to others.”
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solvegas

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Re: The R.I.P. Thread
« Reply #1718 on: August 06, 2018, 10:53:18 AM »
^ Shame 'cause she was a good egg. :(

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solvegas

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Re: The R.I.P. Thread
« Reply #1719 on: August 16, 2018, 10:42:00 AM »
The Queen of Motown, Aretha Franklyn, has died at age 76 of pancreatic cancer. She had been ill for a time. She always had my R-E-S-P-E-C-T. :(

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rtpoe

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Re: The R.I.P. Thread
« Reply #1720 on: August 16, 2018, 10:03:30 PM »
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day:
rtpoe

The last fling of winter is over ...  The earth, the soil itself, has a dreaming quality about it.  It is warm now to the touch; it has come alive; it hides secrets that in a moment, in a little while, it will tell.
-  Donald Culross Peattie

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TheZookie007

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Re: The R.I.P. Thread
« Reply #1721 on: August 16, 2018, 11:56:10 PM »
She wasn't just an accomplished piano player, nor just the greatest singer of all time (according to Rolling Stone Magazine). She was also a bad-ass. As Trevor Noah quipped, she was the original "Bitch Better Have My Money" woman :)
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rtpoe

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Re: The R.I.P. Thread
« Reply #1722 on: August 18, 2018, 11:33:55 PM »
KOFI ANNAN (1938-2018)

Kofi Atta Annan was born with a twin sister on April 8, 1938, in Kumasi, Ghana — in what was then the British colony of the Gold Coast. His father named him in the Ghanaian Akan language: Kofi means "born on Friday" and Atta means "twin."

After attending schools in the Gold Coast, Mr. Annan won a Ford Foundation scholarship to Macalester College in St. Paul, MN where he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1961. He soon got a job as a junior administrative and budget officer with the U.N. World Health Organization in Geneva.

He rose steadily through the ranks, attaining special notice at the start of the Persian Gulf War in 1990. On a special mission to Baghdad as chief of personnel, he helped persuade the Iraqis to release 900 U.N. employees and dependents held as hostages. He also organized an airlift of hundreds of thousands of Asian workers back to their original homes.

U.N. Secretary General Boutros-Ghali pulled Mr. Annan out of the United Nations’ bureaucratic ranks in 1992, naming him deputy chief of peacekeeping. The next year, Mr. Annan was promoted to chief of peacekeeping with the rank of undersecretary general, the highest in the U.N. civil service. Mr. Annan presided over a record expansion of peacekeeping to 75,000 troops in 19 missions.

He and the U.N. took a lot of justified criticism over their failures in Rwandan and the Balkans in the mid 1990s, but Annan owned up to and learned from them. "The international community is guilty of sins of omission. I myself, as head of the UN’s peacekeeping department at the time, pressed dozens of countries for troops. I believed at that time that I was doing my best," he said in a 2004 speech. "But I realized after the genocide that there was more that I could and should have done to sound the alarm and rally support. This painful memory, along with that of Bosnia and Herzegovina, has influenced much of my thinking, and many of my actions, as secretary-general."

In 1997, he succeeded Boutros-Ghali as the Secretary General. He changed the long-standing notion that the U.N. could not interfere in the internal matters of a member nation, realizing that it could indeed threaten international stability (presaging today's refugee crisis). He also worked to make his position a more visible one, doing things like throwing out the first pitch at a World Series game and appearing on Sesame Street.

His first term was capped with a Nobel Peace Prize (which he shared with the U.N. itself) in 2001. In his second term, he found himself in direct opposition to the Bush Administration over the Iraq War. His reputation wasn't helped when an "oil for food" scandal broke, claiming that Saddam Hussein was profiting from oil sales and food kickbacks despite U.N. sanctions. Annan was accused of not doing enough to stop the illegal sales - he was later cleared of any involvement.

After his retirement in 2006, he started a diplomatic foundation to promote global sustainable development, security and peace. A year later, his reputation was boosted after he successfully helped negotiate a power-sharing deal to end post-election violence in Kenya. Raila Odinga, the opposition leader who signed the agreement, called Annan "the man who stepped in and saved the country from collapse".

In 2012 he was made chair of The Elders, a peace and human rights advocacy group started by South Africa's Nelson Mandela. He was also named a U.N. Special Envoy to Syria, but quit after six months citing the failures of world powers to fulfil their commitments. Some things were beyond even his abilities.

He died peacefully after a short illness, his wife and children with him.

Kofi Annan has devoted almost his entire working life to the U.N. As Secretary-General, he has been pre-eminent in bringing new life to the organization. While clearly underlining the U.N.’s traditional responsibility for peace and security, he has also emphasized its obligations with regard to human rights. He has risen to such new challenges as HIV/AIDS and international terrorism, and brought about more efficient utilization of the U.N.’s modest resources. In an organization that can hardly become more than its members permit, he has made clear that sovereignty can not be a shield behind which member states conceal their violations. - Nobel Peace Prize citation

Kofi was the epitome of human decency and grace. In a world now filled with leaders who are anything but that, the world’s loss becomes even more painful. He was a friend to thousands and a leader of millions. - Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights
rtpoe

The last fling of winter is over ...  The earth, the soil itself, has a dreaming quality about it.  It is warm now to the touch; it has come alive; it hides secrets that in a moment, in a little while, it will tell.
-  Donald Culross Peattie

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TheZookie007

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Re: The R.I.P. Thread
« Reply #1723 on: August 19, 2018, 12:28:54 AM »
As the first black African UN Secretary-General, he definitely was one of Africa's greatest diplomats and statesmen. He was married twice, first to a Nigerian woman (with whom he had two offspring), and then to a Swedish woman, who is now his widow. She had a kid from a previous relationship, and all three kids were with her at his deathbed.

In his home country of Ghana, they will be in official mourning for an entire week. Throughout the country and in all Ghanaian diplomatic outposts, the Black Star flag will be flying at half-mast to, as Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo said, "honor of one of our greatest compatriots. He brought considerable renown to our country by this position and through his conduct and comportment in the global arena. He was an ardent believer in the capacity of the Ghanaian to chart his or her own course onto the path of progress and prosperity."

Tributes have been flowing in from around the world.

Kofi was humanity’s best example, the epitome, of human decency and grace. In a world now filled with leaders who are anything but that, our loss, the world’s loss becomes even more painful...He was a friend to thousands and a leader of millions.”

-- Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights


"Saddened to hear that Kofi Annan has passed away. His warmth should never be mistaken for weakness. Annan showed that one can be a great humanitarian and a strong leader at the same time. The UN and the world have lost one of their giants."

-- Jens Stoltenberg, NATO Secretary General


"Kofi Annan was an outstanding statesman serving the world community. It will never be forgotten how steadfastly he advocated peace, security, development and human rights."
 
-- Angela Merkel, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany


"Incredibly sad day to wake up to the news that the wonderful Kofi Annan is no longer with us – he was an extraordinary individual who committed his life to guiding the world to a better place."

-- Sir Richard Branson (who with Peter Gabriel first mooted the idea of The Elders)
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solvegas

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Re: The R.I.P. Thread
« Reply #1724 on: August 24, 2018, 11:36:52 AM »
Today, Robin Leach of fame as host of " Lifestyles of the rich and famous " passed away here in Sin City at 76 years of age from medical complications.