Jun
29
NEW YORK - A European Vogue cover model fell to her death from her Manhattan apartment building Saturday in an apparent suicide, published reports said.
Ruslana Korshunova, 20, died around 2:30 p.m. in a fall from a building on Water Street, in Manhattan’s Financial District, The New York Post, the Daily News and Newsday reported. The newspapers cited unnamed officials and police.
Police said the fall was under investigation. Korushnova’s New York agency and a spokeswoman for medical examiners did not immediately return telephone messages.
Originally from the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, the almond-eyed, flowing-haired Korshunova appeared in advertisements and on runways for such designers as Marc Jacobs, Nina Ricci and DKNY. British Vogue hailed her as “a face to be excited about” in 2005.
Her break came when modeling booker Debbie Jones noticed her while perusing an in-flight magazine article about Korushnova’s hometown of Almaty, according to the Vogue report.
“She looked like something out of a fairytale!” Jones told the magazine. “We had to find her and we searched high and low until we did!”
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Jun
23
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Comedian George Carlin, a counter-culture hero famed for his routines about drugs and dirty words, died of heart failure at a Los Angeles-area hospital on Sunday, a spokesman said. He was 71.
Carlin, who had a history of heart and drug-dependency problems, died at Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica about 6 p.m. PDT (9 p.m. EDT) after being admitted earlier in the afternoon for chest pains, spokesman Jeff Abraham told Reuters.
Known for his edgy, provocative material, Carlin achieved status as an anti-Establishment icon in the 1970s with stand-up bits full of drug references and a routine called “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television.” A regulatory battle over a radio broadcast of the routine ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
In the 1978 case, Federal Communications Commission vs. Pacifica Foundation, the top U.S. court ruled that the words cited in Carlin’s routine were indecent, and that the government’s broadcast regulator could ban them from being aired at times when children might be listening.
Carlin’s comedic sensibility often came back to a central theme: humanity is doomed.
“I don’t have any beliefs or allegiances. I don’t believe in this country, I don’t believe in religion, or a god, and I don’t believe in all these man-made institutional ideas,” he told Reuters in a 2001 interview.
Carlin, who wrote several books and performed in many television comedy specials, is survived by his wife Sally Wade, and daughter Kelly Carlin McCall.
(Reporting by Dean Goodman and Steve Gorman; Editing by Patricia Zengerle)
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May
31
FAIRFAX, Va. - The man whose parents’ battle to save him from a nerve disease was told in the movie “Lorenzo’s Oil” has died at his home in Virginia.
The father of Lorenzo Odone says his son died Friday at age 30. Doctors had predicted he would die when he was 8.
Augusto Odone says his son had come down recently with pneumonia.
Susan Sarandon and Nick Nolte starred as Michaela and Augusto Odone in the 1992 movie. They formulated an oil that they said helped their son fight the neurological disease.
A study published in 2005 verified that the oil could prevent the onset of symptoms.
May
29
MEMPHIS, Tenn. - A woman who defied medical odds and spent nearly 60 years in an iron lung after being diagnosed with polio as a child died Wednesday after a power failure shut down the machine that kept her breathing, her family said.
Dianne Odell, 61, had been confined to the 7-foot-long metal tube since she was stricken by polio at 3 years old.
Family members were unable to get an emergency generator working after a power failure knocked out electricity to the Odell family’s residence near Jackson, about 80 miles northeast of Memphis, brother-in-law Will Beyer said.
“We did everything we could do but we couldn’t keep her breathing,” Beyer said. “Dianne had gotten a lot weaker over the past several months and she just didn’t have the strength to keep going.”
Capt. Jerry Elston of the Madison County Sheriff’s Department said emergency crews could do little to help. The local power company reported spotty power outages in the area because of a tree that fell on a power line.
Odell was afflicted with “bulbo-spinal” polio three years before a polio vaccine was discovered and largely stopped the spread of the crippling childhood disease.
She spent her life in the iron lung, cared for by her parents, other family members and aides provided by a nonprofit foundation. Though confined inside the 750-pound apparatus, Odell managed to get a high school diploma, take college courses and write a children’s book about a “wishing star” named Blinky.
“Dianne was one of the kindest and most considerate people you could meet. She was always concerned about others and their well-being,” said Frank McMeen, president of the West Tennessee Health Care Foundation which helped raise money for equipment and nursing assistance for Odell.
Odell accepted her life with grace, McMeen said.
“Everyone she encountered came to her because they cared about her,” he said, “so she grew up in her 61 years thinking every person is good.”
Odell’s iron lung, similar to those used during the U.S. polio epidemics that peaked in the 1950s, was a cylindrical chamber with a seal at the neck. She lay on her back with only her head exposed and made eye contact with visitors through an angled mirror. She operated a television set with a small blow tube and wrote on a voice-activated computer.
The positive and negative pressures produced by the machine forced air into her lungs and then expelled it.
Iron lungs were largely replaced by positive-pressure airway ventilators in the late 1950s that give users much more freedom of movement. But a spinal deformity from the polio kept Odell from wearing a more modern, portable breathing device.
Joan Headley of Post-Polio Health International in St. Louis said about 30 people in the United States still rely on iron lungs but few users are confined to them all the time. No one keeps records, she said, on the longest confinement.
Caregivers could slide Odell’s bedding out of her iron lung for basic nursing care but only briefly, McMeen said.
Though Odell could not leave the iron lung, she was able to be moved in the machine out of her home. For Odell’s 60th birthday, in February 2007, friends and family held a party for her, with about 200 guests, at a downtown hotel in Jackson, a town of about 50,000 residents. She had a 9-foot birthday cake and letters from around the country, McMeen said.
In a 2001 interview with The Associated Press, Odell said she wrote her children’s book to show youngsters, especially those with physical disabilities, that they should never give up.
“It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you see someone do the same thing,” she said.
May
26
BOISE, Idaho - J.R. Simplot left home in 1923 at age 14 with four gold coins given to him by his mother. He ended his life as the spud king of America and one of the nation’s richest men.
The Idaho farmer, who dominated the state’s business and political landscape for 70 years, died Sunday at his Boise home at age 99. Ada County Coroner Erwin Sonnenberg said Simplot apparently died of natural causes.
His businesses, still family owned, manufacture agriculture, horticulture and turf fertilizers; animal feed and seeds; food products such as fruits, potatoes and other vegetables; and industrial chemicals and irrigation products. He all but invented the first commercially viable frozen french fries in the world.
Simplot and his family were ranked at No. 80 on Forbes magazine’s 2006 list of richest Americans, with an estimated wealth of $3.2 billion.
In 1980, at age 71, Simplot took a gamble on the next generation of businessmen, giving Ward and Joe Parkinson $1 million for 40 percent of what would become computer chip maker Micron Technology Inc. Over the years, he pumped in $20 million more to help Micron build its first manufacturing plant and to stay afloat. Micron went on to become a major producer of DRAM memory chips, which are used to store information in personal computers.
Born John Richard Simplot in Dubuque, Iowa, he was raised with five siblings on a hardscrabble homestead in Declo in south-central Idaho.
In 1923, he left home with four $20 gold coins and paid $1 a day for room and board at Declo’s only hotel. As a shrewd young businessman, Simplot bought interest-bearing scrip paid to teachers who also were boarding there for 50 cents on the dollar.
He used it as for collateral on a bank loan to buy 600 hogs at $1 each. When pork prices jumped the next year, he brought some rare fat hogs to market for a whopping $7,500.
That was Simplot’s stake for the potato business. He leased land and from an early partner learned to plant certified seed, not cull potatoes as was common then. Idaho’s dominance in potatoes grew with the innovation.
Simplot bought an early electric potato sorter and by 1940 had bought or built 33 potato warehouses along the rich Snake River plains from Idaho Falls to Vale, Ore.
A chance encounter with a Chicago businessman led Simplot into the onion-drying business in Caldwell in 1941. He made $500,000 the first year and soon was supplying much of the dried potatoes and vegetables consumed by U.S. troops during World War II.
The headstrong young man then started buying ranches, cattle and timberland. Taking notice of the wartime shortage of fertilizer, he bought phosphate reserves and built a fertilizer production plant at Pocatello.
After the war, his food production business expanded into freezing and canning, developing the product that would become the company’s mainstay: the frozen french fry.
Simplot struck a deal with McDonald’s Corp. founder Ray Kroc, and his fry business grew with Americans’ love for fast food.
Late into his life, the former McDonald’s board member drove his white Lincoln Town Car with “Mr. Spud” vanity plates to the fast food chain for hashbrowns or french fries several times a week. More recently, he could be seen driving around Boise in a motorized cart.
In 2004, he donated his former home in the Boise Foothills to the state to be used as Idaho’s new governor’s mansion.
Like many captains of industry, Simplot had scrapes with the law.
In the mid-70s, Simplot was charged with trying to manipulate Maine potato futures. He was barred from commodities trading for six years and paid $50,000 in fines and an undisclosed amount to settle a lawsuit.
In 1977, he and the J.R. Simplot Co. each paid $40,000 in penalties for failing to report income and claiming false deductions.
Not a religious man - “I’m a fact man and if it don’t add up, I don’t buy it; I don’t believe in hocus pocus,” he said in a 1999 interview - Simplot credited his longevity to disdain for tobacco and alcohol.
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May
13
Polish Holocaust hero dies at age 98
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WARSAW, Poland - Irena Sendler - credited with saving some 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazi Holocaust by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto, some of them in baskets - died Monday, her family said. She was 98.
Sendler, among the first to be honored by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial as a Righteous Among Nations for her wartime heroism, died at a Warsaw hospital, daughter Janina Zgrzembska told The Associated Press.
President Lech Kaczynski expressed “great regret” over Sendler’s death, calling her “extremely brave” and “an exceptional person.” In recent years, Kaczynski had spearheaded a campaign to put Sendler’s name forward as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker with the city’s welfare department when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, launching World War II. Warsaw’s Jews were forced into a walled-off ghetto.
Seeking to save the ghetto’s children, Sendler masterminded risky rescue operations. Under the pretext of inspecting sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, she and her assistants ventured inside the ghetto - and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and in trams, sometimes wrapped up as packages.
Teenagers escaped by joining teams of workers forced to labor outside the ghetto. They were placed in families, orphanages, hospitals or convents.
Records show that Sendler’s team of about 20 people saved nearly 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto between October 1940 and its final liquidation in April 1943, when the Nazis burned the ghetto, shooting the residents or sending them to death camps.
“Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful secret messengers, who today are no longer living, is the justification of my existence on this earth, and not a title to glory,” Sendler said in 2007 in a letter to the Polish Senate after lawmakers honored her efforts in 2007.
In hopes of one day uniting the children with their families - most of whom perished in the Nazis’ death camps - Sendler wrote the children’s real names on slips of paper that she kept at home.
When German police came to arrest her in 1943, an assistant managed to hide the slips, which Sendler later buried in a jar under an apple tree in an associate’s yard. Some 2,500 names were recorded.
“It took a true miracle to save a Jewish child,” Elzbieta Ficowska, who was saved by Sendler’s team as a baby in 1942, recalled in an AP interview in 2007. “Mrs. Sendler saved not only us, but also our children and grandchildren and the generations to come.”
Anyone caught helping Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland risked being summarily shot, along with family members - a fate Sendler only barely escaped herself after the 1943 raid by the Gestapo.
The Nazis took her to the notorious Pawiak prison, which few people left alive. Gestapo agents tortured her repeatedly, leaving Sendler with scars on her body - but she refused to betray her team.
“I kept silent. I preferred to die than to reveal our activity,” she was quoted as saying in Anna Mieszkowska’s biography, “Mother of the Children of the Holocaust: The Story of Irena Sendler.”
Zegota, an underground organization helping Jews, paid a bribe to German guards to free her from the prison. Under a different name, she continued her work.
After World War II, Sendler worked as a social welfare official and director of vocational schools, continuing to assist some of the children she rescued.
“A great person has died - a person with a great heart, with great organizational talents, a person who always stood on the side of the weak,” Warsaw Ghetto survivor Marek Eldeman told TVN24 television.
In 1965, Sendler became one of the first so-called Righteous Gentiles honored by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem for wartime heroics. Poland’s communist leaders at that time would not allow her to travel to Israel; she collected the award in 1983.
Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev said Sender’s “courageous activities rescuing Jews during the Holocaust serve as a beacon of light to the world, inspiring hope and restoring faith in the innate goodness of mankind.”
Despite the Yad Vashem honor, Sendler was largely forgotten in her homeland until recent years. She came to the world’s attention in 2000 when a group of schoolgirls from Uniontown, Kan., wrote a short play about her called “Life in a Jar.”
It went on to garner international attention, and has been performed more than 200 times in the United States, Canada and Poland.
Sendler, born Irena Krzyzanowska, said she lived according to her physician father’s teachings, arguing that “people can be only divided into good or bad; their race, religion, nationality don’t matter.”
She married Mieczyslaw Sendler but they divorced after the war’s end. Sendler then married fellow underground activist Stefan Zgrzembski, and they had two sons and a daughter. One died a few days after birth. The second son, Adam, died of a heart failure in 1999.
Sendler is survived by her daughter and a granddaughter.
May
6
Co-founder of Baskin-Robbins ice cream stores dies at 90
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LOS ANGELES - Irvine Robbins, who as co-founder of Baskin-Robbins brought Rocky Road, Pralines ‘n Cream and other exotic ice cream concoctions to every corner of America, has died at age 90. Robbins had been ill for some time and died Monday at Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, Calif., said his daughter Marsha Veit.
While the company advertised that it offered 31 flavors, in fact it has created more than 1,000 flavors, according to its Web site.
Generations of kids trooped to Baskin-Robbins stores to buy ice cream flavors like Jamoca, Daiquiri Ice, Pink Bubblegum, Nuts to You and Here Comes the Fudge.
“Frankly, I never met a flavor I didn’t like,” Robbins told The New York Times in 1973.
Some were short-lived and created to mark specific events, such as Lunar Cheesecake for the moon landings and Valley Forge Fudge for the 1976 bicentennial.
When the Beatles were to arrive in the United States in 1964, a reporter called to ask whether Baskin-Robbins was going to commemorate the event with a new flavor.
Robbins didn’t have a flavor planned but quickly replied, “Uh, Beatle Nut, of course.”
The flavor was created, manufactured and delivered in just five days, according to the Web site.
Robbins opened his first ice cream store in Glendale, Calif., in December 1945, following his discharge from the Army. He used $6,000 from a cashed-in insurance policy his father had given him for his bar mitzvah.
Robbins offered 21 flavors at the store.
“In light of what Baskin-Robbins was to become, that first store was incredibly amateurish,” according to a biography by his daughter Veit. “It was called ‘Snowbird’ because Robbins couldn’t think of anything else. The opening was delayed for a day because the paint on the floor hadn’t dried.”
His cousin Sybil Hartfield bought $39 of the first day’s sales of $53, according to the biography.
His brother-in-law, the late Burton Baskin, opened his own ice cream store in neighboring Pasadena a year later. By the end of the 1940s, they had joined forces to create Baskin-Robbins. Robbins recalled they used a flip of the coin to decide which name came first.
They also decided to sell their stores to managers, pioneering the franchise concept for ice cream stores.
As corporate policy, employees were allowed to eat all the ice cream they wanted, because, Robbins said, “I don’t want my employees stealing.”
Robbins was dedicated to upholding the quality of his ice cream regardless of the cost, his daughter said.
“Everybody has a proprietary interest in ice cream,” Robbins told the Times for the 1973 story. “All you have to do is mention ice cream and everybody has a flavor.”
Baskin-Robbins was sold to United Fruit Co. in 1967, but Robbins continued to work for the company until retiring in the 1970s.
Today, Baskin-Robbins is part of Dunkin’ Brands Inc. and has more than 5,800 franchises worldwide.
In addition to his daughter, survivors include his wife, Irma; another daughter, Erin Robbins; a son, John Robbins; and sisters Shirley Familian and Elka Weiner. His son is a noted author (”Diet for a New America”) and advocate of vegetarianism and natural foods.
May
5
Mildred Loving, matriarch of interracial marriage, dies
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RICHMOND, Va. - Mildred Loving, a black woman whose challenge to Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down such laws nationwide, has died, her daughter said Monday.
Peggy Fortune said Loving, 68, died Friday at her home in rural Milford. She did not disclose the cause of death.
“I want (people) to remember her as being strong and brave yet humble - and believed in love,” Fortune told The Associated Press.
Loving and her white husband, Richard, changed history in 1967 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their right to marry. The ruling struck down laws banning racially mixed marriages in at least 17 states.
“There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the equal protection clause,” the court ruled in a unanimous decision.
Her husband died in 1975. Shy and soft-spoken, Loving shunned publicity and in a rare interview with The Associated Press last June, insisted she never wanted to be a hero - just a bride.
“It wasn’t my doing,” Loving said. “It was God’s work.”
Mildred Jeter was 11 when she and 17-year-old Richard began courting, according to Phyl Newbeck, a Vermont author who detailed the case in the 2004 book, “Virginia Hasn’t Always Been for Lovers.”
She became pregnant a few years later, she and Loving got married in Washington in 1958, when she was 18. Mildred told the AP she didn’t realize it was illegal.
“I think my husband knew,” Mildred said. “I think he thought (if) we were married, they couldn’t bother us.”
But they were arrested a few weeks after they returned to Central Point, their hometown in rural Caroline County north of Richmond. They pleaded guilty to charges of “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth,” according to their indictments.
They avoided jail time by agreeing to leave Virginia - the only home they’d known - for 25 years. They moved to Washington for several years, then launched a legal challenge by writing to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who referred the case to the American Civil Liberties Union.
Attorneys later said the case came at the perfect time - just as lawmakers passed the Civil Rights Act, and as across the South, blacks were defying Jim Crow’s hold.
“The law that threatened the Lovings with a year in jail was a vestige of a hateful, discriminatory past that could not stand in the face of the Lovings’ quiet dignity,” said Steven Shapiro, national legal director for the ACLU.
“We loved each other and got married,” she told The Washington Evening Star in 1965, when the case was pending. “We are not marrying the state. The law should allow a person to marry anyone he wants.”
After the Supreme Court ruled, the couple returned to Virginia, where they lived with their children, Donald, Peggy and Sidney. Each June 12, the anniversary of the ruling, Loving Day events around the country mark the advances of mixed-race couples.
Richard Loving died in a car accident that also injured his wife. “They said I had to leave the state once, and I left with my wife,” he told the Star in 1965. “If necessary, I will leave Virginia again with my wife, but I am not going to divorce her.”
Mar
28
Parents pick prayer over docs; girl dies
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WESTON, Wis. - Police are investigating an 11-year-old girl’s death from an undiagnosed, treatable form of diabetes after her parents chose to pray for her rather than take her to a doctor.
An autopsy showed Madeline Neumann died Sunday of diabetic ketoacidosis, a condition that left too little insulin in her body, Everest Metro Police Chief Dan Vergin said.
She had probably been ill for about a month, suffering symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, excessive thirst, loss of appetite and weakness, the chief said Wednesday, noting that he expects to complete the investigation by Friday and forward the results to the district attorney.
The girl’s mother, Leilani Neumann, said that she and her family believe in the Bible and that healing comes from God, but that they do not belong to an organized religion or faith, are not fanatics and have nothing against doctors.
She insisted her youngest child, a wiry girl known to wear her straight brown hair in a ponytail, was in good health until recently.
“We just noticed a tiredness within the past two weeks,” she said Wednesday. “And then just the day before and that day (she died), it suddenly just went to a more serious situation. We stayed fast in prayer then. We believed that she would recover. We saw signs that to us, it looked like she was recovering.”
Her daughter - who hadn’t seen a doctor since she got some shots as a 3-year-old, according to Vergin - had no fever and there was warmth in her body, she said.
The girl’s father, Dale Neumann, a former police officer, said he started CPR “as soon as the breath of life left” his daughter’s body.
Family members elsewhere called authorities to seek help for the girl.
“My sister-in-law, she’s very religious, she believes in faith instead of doctors …,” the girl’s aunt told a sheriff’s dispatcher Sunday afternoon in a call from California. “And she called my mother-in-law today … and she explained to us that she believes her daughter’s in a coma now and she’s relying on faith.”
The dispatcher got more information from the caller and asked whether an ambulance should be sent.
“Please,” the woman replied. “I mean, she’s refusing. She’s going to fight it. … We’ve been trying to get her to take her to the hospital for a week, a few days now.”
The aunt called back with more information on the family’s location, emergency logs show. Family friends also made a 911 call from the home. Police and paramedics arrived within minutes and immediately called for an ambulance that took her to a hospital.
But less than an hour after authorities reached the home, Madeline - a bright student who left public school for home schooling this semester - was declared dead.
She is survived by her parents and three older siblings.
“We are remaining strong for our children,” Leilani Neumann said. “Only our faith in God is giving us strength at this time.”
The Neumanns said they moved from California to a modern, middle-class home in woodsy Weston, just outside Wassau in central Wisconsin, about two years ago to open a coffee shop and be closer to other relatives. A basketball hoop is set up in the driveway.
Leilani Neumann said she and her husband are not worried about the investigation because “our lives are in God’s hands. We know we did not do anything criminal. We know we did the best for our daughter we knew how to do.”
Source: Yahoo News
Mar
21
Woman dies after ray strikes her
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MIAMI, Florida (CNN) — A woman on a boat died after a spotted eagle ray leaped from the water off the Florida Keys Thursday and struck her, officials said.
The dead spotted eagle ray lies on the deck of a boat in Florida.
1 of 2 The force of the blow pushed the woman backward and she died when she hit her head on the boat deck, officials said.
“It’s just as freakish of an accident as I have heard,” said Jorge Pino of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. “The chances of this occurring are so remote that most of us are completely astonished that this happened.”
The commission identified the woman as Judy Kay Zagorski, 57, of Pigeon, Michigan.
The woman was seated or standing in the front of the boat as her husband piloted the vessel at about 25 mph out of a channel, Pino said. “The ray just actually popped up in front of the vessel,” he said. “The father had not even a second to react. It was too late. It happened instantly and the woman fell backwards and, unfortunately, died as a result of the collision.”
The accident happened off the coast of Marathon, about an hour’s drive south of Miami. The woman, who was with her husband and children, was taken to the Mariner Hospital in Tavernier, where she was pronounced dead.