At the last CI staff meeting

It’s CI’s birthday! Two.

How would you live without us? Let us know! Congratulate us.

Conditions of congratulating us:

1. No hate bloggers

2. No nasty comments about those pro or anti the swimming pool

3. No free trips to the Maryborough Highland Society club in Maryborough to play pokies

4. No calling the editor so deluded it is almost funny/a leftist agitator who does a pretty poor impersonation of a journo/asking him just WHO he is and WHAT planet he is from/that he uses weary old tools of the leftist and points the Nazi finger of shame/saying he has a juvenile and sarcastic manner/an idiot

5. No saying the editor’s sophistry is breathtaking. Sophistication – yes, sophistry – no.

6. No saying Far from being independent and un-biased, the author still favours left/green articles and continues to take swipes at Howard, Bush and other captains of capitalism.

7. No saying CI will suit local self-styled artists and pseudo intelligentsia. Some discretion should be used if allowing minors to visit it as offensive language is contained in some articles.

8. No calling CI a litany of self indulgent shite/not only inflamatory but also pathetic/truly awful, biased and disenfranchised piece of garbage/grubby little ploy … nothing short of disgusting

9. NO THREATENING US in capital letters. No threatening us in little letters. Neither law suits nor fish in the letter box.

10. No threats to inter CI staff at the Olde Gaol (at least if you’re planning it, MAKE IT A SURPRISE)

11. Take out a paid ad with us!

12. Contribute!

British troops have opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators in the Bogside district of Londonderry, killing 13 civilians.

Seventeen more people, including one woman, were injured by gunfire. Another woman was knocked down by a speeding car.
The army said two soldiers had been hurt and up to 60 people arrested.

They just came in firing – there was no provocation whatsoever
Father Daly

Crank it – play it loud while you read

It was by far the worst day of violence in this largely Roman Catholic city since the present crisis began in 1969.

Bogsiders said the troops opened fire on unarmed men – including one who had his arms up in surrender.

The trouble began as a civil rights procession, defying the Stormont ban on parades and marches, approached an Army barbed wire barricade.

The largely peaceful crowd of between 7,000 and 10,000 was marching in protest at the policy of internment without trial. Some of the younger demonstrators began shouting at the soldiers and chanting, “IRA, IRA”.

A few bottles, broken paving stones, chair legs and heavy pieces of iron grating were thrown at the troops manning the barrier.

Stewards appealed for calm – but more missiles were thrown and the area behind the barricade was quickly strewn with broken glass and other debris.

The 1st Battalion, The Parachute Regiment, which had been standing by in case of trouble, sprang into action. Squads leapt over the barricades and chased the demonstrators.

The gates were opened and eight armoured vehicles went into the Bogside and the remaining demonstrators were quickly surrounded.

Army claims provocation

The army says it opened fire after being shot at first by two snipers in flats overlooking the street. It claims acid bombs were also thrown.

The shooting lasted about 25 minutes.
Father Edward Daly, a Catholic priest, was caught on film helping to carry a teenager who had been fatally wounded, to safety.

He said: “They just came in firing. There was no provocation whatsoever. Most people had their backs to them when they opened fire.”

Major General Robert Ford, Commander, Land Forces Northern Ireland, who was in charge of the operation, insisted his troops had been fired on first.
“There is absolutely no doubt at all that the Parachute battalion did not open up until they had been fired at,” he said.

A 14th man later died of injuries received during the demonstration.

An inquiry into what became known as Bloody Sunday headed by Lord Widgery in 1972 exonerated the Army. It said their firing had “bordered on the reckless” but said the troops had been fired upon first and some of their victims had been armed.

The results of the inquiry were rejected by the Catholic community who began a long campaign for a fresh investigation.

In 1998, Tony Blair’s government announced a new inquiry into Bloody Sunday.

The inquiry, headed by Lord Saville, spent two years taking witness statements. It ended in November 2004 and had cost about £150 million.

Lord Saville’s final report and conclusions were supposed to be published in 2005 but the large amount of evidence being considered delayed publication by another five years. It was finally published in June 2010.

It concluded none of the victims were armed, soldiers gave no warnings before opening fire and the shootings were a “catastrophe” for Northern Ireland, leading to increased violence in subsequent years.

A Mayan priest taking part in a ceremony. Photo: AP

THE last New Year’s Day in human history has come.

You may not believe it, but millions do. They are convinced that ancient Maya priests calculated December 21, 2012, as the end of the world. The only problem is, the ancient Maya predicted no such thing.

In its heyday, circa AD250 to 900, the Mayan civilisation produced a dazzling legacy of literature and learning, art and architecture. But they weren’t preoccupied with apocalypse.

Read more

Farewell Christian Poveda

By Deborah Bonello

The killing of documentary maker Christian Poveda represents a sad loss for a region much in need of greater understanding.

The first, last and only time that I met the French-born filmmaker and photographer Christian Poveda was on 1 April of this year, when I interviewed him in an apartment he was renting in Mexico City while doing promotion for his film, La Vida Loca.

I’d seen the documentary the night before at a screening attended by Poveda, who fielded questions on why he chose to spend 16 months following members of El Salvador’s notoriously violent 18th Street gang with a video camera. It is a film that could well have brought him to his violent end.

Poveda was shot dead on Wednesday 4 September just outside San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, where he lived. Sources say that the night before he was killed, Poveda confessed to being afraid and worried that the gangs were taking a turn for the worse, with a new crop of ever-more vicious leaders coming to the fore.

La Vida Loca is a groundbreaking documentary that shines a light onto the bleak lives of El Salvador’s Mara gangs. Poveda achieved unprecedented, long-term access to certain branches of the gangs and their daily lives in the capital.

I’m not one to speculate on who might be responsible for his death — the disorder, impunity and lawlessness in El Salvador means we might never know. But his murder is a terrible loss, not only to his friends, family and colleagues, but to the journalistic community in Latin America, which already suffers some of the highest rates of aggression and intimidation against members of the trade.

To Poveda, the young people who join las Maras were “victims of society”. He approached the gangs as a documentary filmmaker with an open mind and a lack of moral judgment.

As he said to me during our interview, he was of the opinion that “the majority are young boys that were abandoned at a very young age, and the fact that someone would come from another continent to spend time with them on a daily basis, filming and listening to them, for them that was something very important, that someone was paying attention.”

Many would disagree with Poveda’s assessment of the gangs that stretch across Central America to the United States. Poveda worked as a photojournalist in El Salvador during and after the 12-year-long civil war, which began in 1980. But the gangs really took on their current strength and size in the United States.

Gangs were formed by Salvadorans living on the streets of Los Angeles in the 1980s, many of whom went to the US to escape the civil war ravaging El Salvador. When the peace accords that ended the war were signed in El Salvador in the early 1990s, huge numbers of gang members returned to the country, some of them by choice but most of them through deportation by US authorities. Many were sent back after completing prison sentences.

Although gangs did exist on a small scale in El Salvador before the mass return of migrants from the US, they only grew into the super-gangs they are today after the end of the civil war. The brutally violent groups have been connected with organised crime and other illegal activities across the Americas.

But however you view the gangs, Poveda did what good journalists do — he broadened the discussion, taking a new visual and journalistic angle on an issue that has become so black and white. As the United States continues to sweep the issue of immigration reform under the carpet and turn a blind eye to the repercussions of some of its policies on its smaller, poorer, weaker neighbours, Poveda put some of those realities up on cinema screens on both sides of the Atlantic for all to see.

Tragically, he paid the highest price for doing so.

La Vida Loca, which has been showing on the international film festival circuit, is coming up for commercial release in Mexico and France over the next two months. But the day after Poveda’s death, his producer Gustavo Angel was still trying to negotiate a US release for the film.

I can’t help feeling that if La Vida Loca isn’t seen by audiences within the United States, many of whom have never travelled south of the border, let alone as far south as Central America, we will miss an opportunity to advance the discussion surrounding America’s gang and immigration problems — issues that are inextricably linked.

Deborah Bonello is a blogger and video journalist MexicoReporter.com

www.MexicoReporter.com

The ancient burial-place of the Cantillon family was on an island in Ballyheigh Bay. This island was situated at no great distance from the shore, and at a remote period was overflowed in one of the encroachments which the Atlantic has made on that part of the coast of Kerry. The fishermen declare they have often seen the ruined walls of an old chapel beneath them in the water, as they sailed over the clear green sea of a sunny afternoon.

However this may be, it is well-known that the Cantillons were, like most other Irish families, strongly attached to their ancient burial-place; and this attachment led to the custom, when any of the family died, of carrying the corpse to the seaside, where the coffin was left on the shore within reach of the tide. In the morning it had disappeared, being, as was traditionally believed, conveyed away by the ancestors of the deceased to their family tomb.

Connor Crowe, a county Clare man, was related to the Cantillons by marriage. “Connor Mac in Cruagh, of the seven quarters of Breintragh,” as he was commonly called, and a proud man he was of the name. Connor, be it known, would drink a quart of salt water, for its medicinal virtues, before breakfast; and for the same reason, I suppose, double that quantity of raw whiskey between breakfast and night, which last he did with as little inconvenience to himself as any man in the barony of Moyferta; and were I to add Clanderalaw and Ibrickan, I don’t think I should say wrong.

On the death of Florence Cantillon, Connor Crowe was determined to satisfy himself about the truth of this story of the old church under the sea: so when he heard the news of the old fellow’s death, away with him to Ardfert, where Flory was laid out in high style, and a beautiful corpse he made.

Flory had been as jolly and as rollicking a boy in his day as ever was stretched, and his wake was in every respect worthy of him. There was all kind of entertainment, and all sort of diversion at it, and no less than three girls got husbands there–more luck to them. Everything was as it should be; all that side of the country, from Dingle to Tarbert, was at the funeral. The Keen was sung long and bitterly; and, according to the family custom, the coffin was carried to Ballyheigh strand, where it was laid upon the shore, with a prayer for the repose of the dead.

The mourners departed, one group after another, and at last Connor Crowe was left alone. He then pulled out his whiskey bottle, his drop of comfort, as he called it, which he required, being in grief; and down he sat upon a big stone that was sheltered by a projecting rock, and partly concealed from view, to await with patience the appearance of the ghostly undertakers.

The evening came on mild and beautiful. He whistled an old air which he had heard in his childhood, hoping to keep idle fears out of his head; but the wild strain of that melody brought a thousand recollections with it, which only made the twilight appear more pensive.

“If ’twas near the gloomy tower of Dunmore, in my own sweet country, I was,” said Connor Crowe, with a sigh, “one might well believe that the prisoners, who were murdered long ago there in the vaults under the castle, would be the hands to carry off the coffin out of envy, for never a one of them was buried decently, nor had as much as a coffin amongst them all. ‘Tis often, sure enough, I have heard lamentations and great mourning coming from the vaults of Dunmore Castle; but,” continued he, after fondly pressing his lips to the mouth of his companion and silent comforter, the whiskey bottle, “didn’t I know all the time well enough, ’twas the dismal sounding waves working through the cliffs and hollows of the rocks, and fretting themselves to foam.

“Oh, then, Dunmore Castle, it is you that are the gloomy-looking tower on a gloomy day, with the gloomy hills behind you; when one has gloomy thoughts on their heart, and sees you like a ghost rising out of the smoke made by the kelp burners on the strand, there is, the Lord save us! as fearful a look about you as about the Blue Man’s Lake at midnight. Well, then, anyhow,” said Connor, after a pause, “is it not a blessed night, though surely the moon looks mighty pale in the face? St. Senan himself between us and all kinds of harm.”

It was, in truth, a lovely moonlight night; nothing was to be seen around the dark rocks, and the white pebbly beach, upon which the sea broke with a hoarse and melancholy murmur. Connor, notwithstanding his frequent draughts, felt rather queerish, and almost began to repent his curiosity. It was certainly a solemn sight to behold the black coffin resting upon the white strand. His imagination gradually converted the deep moaning of old ocean into a mournful wail for the dead, and from the shadowy recesses of the rocks he imaged forth strange and visionary forms.

As the night advanced, Connor became weary with watching. He caught himself more than once in the act of nodding, when suddenly giving his head a shake, he would look towards the black coffin. But the narrow house of death remained unmoved before him.

It was long past midnight, and the moon was sinking into the sea, when he heard the sound of many voices, which gradually became stronger, above the heavy and monotonous roll of the sea. He listened, and presently could distinguish a Keen of exquisite sweetness, the notes of which rose and fell with the heaving of the waves, whose deep murmur mingled with and supported the strain!

The Keen grew louder and louder, and seemed to approach the beach, and then fell into a low, plaintive wail. As it ended Connor beheld a number of strange and, in the dim light, mysterious-looking figures emerge from the sea, and surround the coffin, which they prepared to launch into the water.

“This comes of marrying with the creatures of earth,” said one of the figures, in a clear, yet hollow tone.

“True,” replied another, with a voice stiff more fearful, “our king would never have commanded his gnawing white-toothed waves to devour the rocky roots of the island cemetery, had not his daughter, Durfulla, been buried there by her mortal husband!”

“But the time will come,” said a third, bending over the coffin,

“When mortal eye–our work shall spy,
And mortal ear–our dirge shall hear.”

“Then,” said a fourth, “our burial of the Cantillons is at an end for ever!”

As this was spoken the coffin was borne from the beach by a retiring wave, and the company of sea people prepared to follow it; but at the moment one chanced to discover Connor Crowe, as fixed with wonder and as motionless with fear as the stone on which he sat.

“The time is come,” cried the unearthly being, “the time is come; a human eye looks on the forms of ocean, a human ear has heard their voices. Farewell to the Cantillons; the sons of the sea are no longer doomed to bury the dust of the earth!”

One after the other turned slowly round, and regarded Connor Crowe, who still remained as if bound by a spell. Again arose their funeral song; and on the next wave they followed the coffin. The sound of the lamentation died away, and at length nothing was heard but the rush of waters. The coffin and the train of sea people sank over the old churchyard, and never since the funeral of old Flory Cantillon have any of the family been carried to the strand of Ballyheigh, for conveyance to their rightful burial-place, beneath the waves of the Atlantic.

They killed you and
didn’t tell us where
they buried your body,

But ever since that day
the whole country
has been your grave

or rather;
in every part of the
country that

does not hold your body
you have risen again.

They thought they had
killed you with their order
of fire!

They thought they
were burying you

And what they were doing
was planting a seed.

Epitafio para la tumba de Adolfo Báez Bone

Te mataron y no
nos dijieron donde
enterraron su cuerpo,

Pero desde entonces
todo el territorio
es tu sepulcro

o más bien;
en cada palmo
de territorio nacional
en que

no está tu cuerpo
tú resucitaste

Creyeron que te
mataban con una orden
de ¡fuego!

Creyeron que te
enterraban

Y lo que hacían
era enterrar una semilla.

Adolfo Baez-Bone was murdered by the Nicaraguan National Guard under the dictator Somoza in 1954.

Farewell Betty Skelton Erde

Betty Skelton Erde, an auto racing pioneer who was once the fastest woman on Earth, has died. She was 85.

Erde began as a female stunt pilot as a teenager in the 1940s.

She achieved dozens of firsts: the auto industry’s first female test driver in 1954; the first woman to set a world land speed record in 1956 (145 mph at Daytona Beach); and the world’s land speed record for women in 1965, hitting 315.72 mph at Bonneville, Utah. She was inducted into the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America.

She set 17 aviation and automobile records, was known as “the First Lady of Firsts”, and helped create opportunities for women in aviation, auto racing, astronautics and advertising.

Erde flew planes into her 70s. When she was 82, she drove around her retirement community in a red Corvette.

She died on 31 August in The Villages, the central Florida city where she lived with her husband, Allan Erde.

Controversy has raged over the precise details of Allende’s death, but morally the truth may not matter much. Allende died as a result of a treasonous revolt by his own armed forces. But for many Chileans, knowing what really happened has acquired huge significance.

The autopsy may be inconclusive, but his words live on:

11.9.73, La Moneda (Presidential palace), Santiago de Chile

My friends,

Surely this will be the last opportunity for me to address you. The Air Force has bombed the antennas of Radio Magallanes.

My words do not have bitterness but disappointment. May they be a moral punishment for those who have betrayed their oath: soldiers of Chile, titular commanders in chief, Admiral Merino, who has designated himself Commander of the Navy, and Mr. Mendoza, the despicable general who only yesterday pledged his fidelity and loyalty to the Government, and who also has appointed himself Chief of the Carabineros [paramilitary police].

Given these facts, the only thing left for me is to say to workers: I am not going to resign! Placed in a historic transition, I will pay for loyalty to the people with my life. And I say to them that I am certain that the seeds which we have planted in the good conscience of thousands and thousands of Chileans will not be shriveled forever.

They have force and will be able to dominate us, but social processes can be arrested by neither crime nor force. History is ours, and people make history.

Workers of my country: I want to thank you for the loyalty that you always had, the confidence that you deposited in a man who was only an interpreter of great yearnings for justice, who gave his word that he would respect the Constitution and the law and did just that. At this definitive moment, the last moment when I can address you, I wish you to take advantage of the lesson: foreign capital, imperialism, together with the reaction, created the climate in which the Armed Forces broke their tradition, the tradition taught by General Schneider and reaffirmed by Commander Araya, victims of the same social sector who today are hoping, with foreign assistance, to re-conquer the power to continue defending their profits and their privileges.

I address you, above all, the modest woman of our land, the campesina who believed in us, the mother who knew our concern for children. I address professionals of Chile, patriotic professionals who continued working against the sedition that was supported by professional associations, classist associations that also defended the advantages of capitalist society. I address the youth, those who sang and gave us their joy and their spirit of struggle. I address the man of Chile, the worker, the farmer, the intellectual, those who will be persecuted, because in our country fascism has been already present for many hours — in terrorist attacks, blowing up the bridges, cutting the railroad tracks, destroying the oil and gas pipelines, in the face of the silence of those who had the obligation to act. They were committed. History will judge them.

Surely Radio Magallanes will be silenced, and the calm metal instrument of my voice will no longer reach you. It does not matter. You will continue hearing it. I will always be next to you. At least my memory will be that of a man of dignity who was loyal to his country.

The people must defend themselves, but they must not sacrifice themselves. The people must not let themselves be destroyed or riddled with bullets, but they cannot be humiliated either.

Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Go forward knowing that, sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again and free men will walk through them to construct a better society.

Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers!

These are my last words, and I am certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain, I am certain that, at the very least, it will be a moral lesson that will punish felony, cowardice, and treason.

Santiago de Chile, 11 September 1973

Catania’s Garibaldi Hospital, announcing the death, said Licitra never regained consciousness after suffering severe head and chest injuries in the August 27 accident. Doctors had said Licitra crashed his scooter into a wall near the town of Ragusa, apparently after suffering an interruption of blood to the brain while driving.

The hospital said Licitra’s family agreed to make his organs available for transplant.

“So very sad to say goodbye to Salvatore Licitra. I will miss you,” soprano Deborah Voigt, a frequent onstage partner, wrote on her Facebook page.

“His passing in the fullness of his career hurts,” the La Scala opera house wrote in its own announcement of the tenor’s death.

La Scala noted that Licitra debuted in the famed Milan venue in the 1998-1999 season, with maestro Riccardo Muti conducting him in Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino.”

But it was on the stage of Metropolitan Opera in New York, that Licitra, the Swiss-born son of Sicilian parents, grabbed the world’s attention. He subbed for mega-tenor Luciano Pavarotti in a gala performance in 2002 of Puccini’s “Tosca,” wowing the audience and winning long ovations for his two big arias. The audience’s response brought tears to his eyes.

Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager, hailed Licitra as “one of the greatest natural tenor talents of his generation. His premature death is tragic for his family, friends and loved ones, and his legions of admirers around the world, which include his many fans at the Met.”

La Scala praised Licitra as a “dramatic tenor, with strength.”

“Licitra represented the school and tradition of Italian song, in his natural relationships to words,” the Milan opera house said. “A decade of his personal history was interwoven with our theater.”

The tenor made his debut in Parma, Italy, in 1998.

He had traveled to the Ragusa area in late summer ahead of a ceremony to receive a local music prize.

DFAT said on Thursday that the 26-year-old Hibberd, from Queensland, died after she was struck by a car on Wednesday in Como in Italy’s north.

The accident reportedly occurred when she was riding on a road between Appiano Gentile and Lurato Caccivio, north of Milan, with Colombian rider Diego Tamayo. Tamayo was not hurt.

A former runner from Noosa, Hibberd won the national road race series in 2008 before moving overseas in 2009 to pursue her career as a professional road cyclist. She joined the Cassina Rizzardi A Style Fionucci team at the start of this season.

Veteran Australian sprinter Robbie McEwen posted on Twitter: “Just read the terribly sad news about the death of Aussie rider Carly Hibberd, sincere condolences and deepest sympathies to her loved ones.”

Hibberd’s fatal accident follows the death of Belgium’s Wouter Weylandt in the Giro d’Italia on May 9.

Australian female cyclist Amy Gillet was killed and five of her teammates injured after a car ran into them as they prepared for a road race in Germany in 2005.

Farewell Norma Lyon

Norma “Duffy” Lyon, whose life-size butter sculptures of cows, Elvis and even Jesus and his disciples delighted Americans for nearly half a century, has died. She was 81.

Lyon suffered a stroke at her rural home Sunday and died shortly after at a hospital.

Known to most people as the “butter cow lady,” Lyon was pregnant with her seventh child when she produced her first bovine butter sculpture, a 600-pound cow, for the Iowa State Fair in 1959.

She went on to sculpt a butter cow every year until she retired in 2006, and along the way also sculpted the likes of Garth Brooks, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, Smokey Bear and other images in her 40-degree refrigerated showcase at the fair.

She picked up her penchant for sculpting while earning her veterinary science degree at Iowa State University and helping her husband with the family dairy and beef cattle operation. In the midst of her animal medicine and mammalian anatomy classes, Lyon took two sculpting classes.

The Iowa State Fair has featured a butter cow every year since 1911 as a promotion for dairy products, and Lyon got her start after working briefly under her predecessor, Earl Dutt, whose work didn’t overly impress her.

“It was a good farm cow, but it wasn’t a show cow,” Lyon told The Associated Press in 1999.

While Lyon wasn’t the genesis of the butter cow, she did expand the medium during her time as a butter sculptor for the state fair, much to the delight of fairgoers.

She began carving companion pieces in 1984, starting with a horse and foal. In 1996, Lyon recreated Iowa artist Grant Woods’ “American Gothic,” the famous painting of a stern-faced man and woman with a pitchfork in front of a farm house.

The following year, Lyon suffered a stroke, but recovered in time to sculpt the traditional cow and a 6-foot likeness of Elvis Presley that saw fairgoers lined up around the building that housed it.

In 1999, Lyon took on what was arguably her most ambitious project: Her own rendition of the biblical story of the Last Supper, featuring disciples around a table leaning back on lounge chairs while Jesus stood at the head of the table with his arms stretched out, looking toward the heavens.

Lyon also garnered attention in 2007, when she publicly backed Barack Obama for president and appeared in campaign ads for him.

“She was very patient and kind,” said Sarah Pratt, who took over as “the new butter lady” in 2007 after apprenticing under Lyon starting when she was 14 years old. “She loved to tell stories, and she’d laugh and we’d laugh together. She was at her best, I think, when she was sculpting.”

Lyon is survived by her husband, G. Joe Lyon, her nine children, 23 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

Farewell Maria Valentim

SAO PAULO — A Brazilian woman listed by Guinness World Records as the world’s oldest person died on Tuesday, just weeks shy of her 115th birthday. The title now reverts to a woman in the United States.

Maria Gomes Valentim died of multiple organ failure, said Helerson Lima, a spokesman for the nursing home where she lived. Valentim would have turned 115 on July 9.

Guinness said Tuesday on its website that Valentim, “the first Brazilian super-centenarian to hold the title,” died at the age of 114 years, 347 days.

On May 18, Guinness determined that Valentim was 48 days older than the person previously considered the world’s oldest human, Besse Cooper from Monroe, Georgia.

“With Maria’s passing, the title of Oldest Living Person reverts back to American Besse Cooper, age 114 years 299 days,” Guinness said.

The Georgia woman’s son, Sid Cooper, said on Tuesday that his mother is doing well at her Monroe retirement community.

“Her memory is still really good,” he said. “She remembers things from a long time ago and recognises people.”

Guinness verified that Valentim was born on July 9, 1896, in the city of Carangola in the south-eastern state of Minas Gerais. She lived there all her life.

Last month, Guinness said on its website that Valentim, who was known as “Grandma Quita,” attributed her longevity to a healthy diet: eating a roll of bread every morning with coffee, fruit and the occasional milk with linseed.

Valentim’s family told reporters that she had a stubborn streak and always made a habit of minding her own business. They also said that her father lived to be 100.

“She says she has lived long because she has always taken care of her own life — and not meddled in the lives of others,” granddaughter Jane Ribeiro Moraes, 63, told a local newspaper in May.

Valentim married her husband, Joao, in 1913. He died in 1946.

Valentim is survived by four grandchildren, seven great-grandchildren and five great-great grandchildren. Her only son died at age 75 in the early 1990s.

Valentim was scheduled to be buried on Tuesday afternoon at the Carangola cemetery.

Farewell Gil Scott-Heron

Poet, novelist, musician, spoken-word guru, campaigner, thorn in the side of the establishment, victim of his own weaknesses: Gil Scott-Heron, who died in New York at the weekend, was a multi-faceted figure, one of the definitive African American voices of the past 50 years, alongside James Brown, Curtis Mayfield, Toni Morrison, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and Prince.

Like many people of my generation, I first heard Scott-Heron’s distinctive, compelling delivery and free-flowing words on The Bottle, a US R&B hit and a worldwide club favourite in the mid-seventies.

A hip British friend soon turned me on to Winter In America, the epochal album the single came from, and the first release that gave equal billing to Scott-Heron’s musical sidekick, the pianist and flautist Brian Jackson, who co-wrote the tour de force track Rivers Of My Fathers, a striking blend of jazz, blues, soul and lyrical metaphors about slavery and the road long travelled.

Their partnership had come together on Pieces Of A Man, the second of three albums Scott-Heron made for Bob Thiele’s jazz label Flying Dutchman, two of which included versions of his most memorable, mordant and potent song, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, included alongside Bob Marley’s Redemption Song and Gaye’s What’s Going On? in a list of the Top 20 Political Songs published by the New Statesman last year.

Scott-Heron declaimed over a stark backing that echoed the Black Power group The Last Poets and anticipated hip-hop by nearly a decade. On Pieces Of A Man, he sang about “Lady Day and John Coltrane”, and painted a vivid picture of junkie life in Home Is Where The Hatred Is, poignantly prescient in view of his subsequent descent into drug addiction and eventual imprisonment in the early 2000s.

He also created a neo-soul, nu-soul template that still serves as the blueprint for a host of today’s R&B and rap stars, from Dr Dre to Common via Mos Def and Chuck D of Public Enemy.

In 1974, Scott-Heron became the first act on Arista Records, the label launched by the former CBS head honcho Clive Davis, the man who had signed Janis Joplin, Santana and Earth, Wind & Fire, and who told Rolling Stone magazine: “Not only is he an excellent poet, musician and performer – three qualities I look for that are rarely combined – but he’s a leader of social thought.”

Scott-Heron made nine albums for Arista, most notably From South Africa To South Carolina – whose opener Johannesburg paved the way for the Special AKA’s Free Nelson Mandela – but left the label under a cloud in the mid-80s.

He was hailed as the Godfather of Rap but, on Message To The Messengers, included on his 1994 album Spirits, he took a typically trenchant view of the artists he had supposedly influenced.

“They need to study music,” he said at the time. “I played in several bands before I began my career as a poet. There’s a big difference between putting words over some music, and blending those same words into the music. There’s not a lot of humour. They use a lot of slang and colloquialisms, and you don’t really see inside the person. Instead, you just get a lot of posturing.”

A natural radical, Gil Scott-Heron never postured, and he injected plenty of humour in Re-Ron and B-Movie, the Reagan-baiting tracks.

The cocaine addiction that blighted his career through much of the nineties was yet to take hold. He was raised by his grandmother in Jackson, Tennessee, after his parents separated when he was two, and his Jamaican-born father, Gil Heron, was a professional footballer who briefly played for Celtic and was nicknamed “The Black Arrow”.

His intellect shone throughout and he published novels in the early 70s – The Vulture, The Nigger Factory – and he campaigned beside Stevie Wonder to turn the birthday of the civil rights leader Martin Luther King into a national holiday in the US.

In the 2000s, he was jailed for possession of cocaine and again for violating the terms of his parole, but in 2007 he began performing and recording again.

Last year’s I’m New Here album, for XL Recordings – and its recent remix edition We’re New Here in conjunction with producer Jamie xx – surpassed many people’s expectations and introduced Gil Scott-Heron to yet another generation of fans. His unique voice and inspiring words live on.

(The Independent UK)

Farewell Leonora Carrington

MEXICO CITY (AP).- British-born painter, writer and sculptor Leonora Carrington, considered one of the last of the original surrealists, has died. She was 94.

Carrington was known for her haunting, dreamlike works that often focused on strange ritual-like scenes with birds, cats, unicorn-like creatures and other animals as onlookers or seeming participants.

Once the lover of German artist Max Ernst, Carrington was also part of a famous wave of artistic and political emigres who arrived in Mexico in the 1930s and ’40s. In the male-dominated realm of surrealism, she was a member of a rare trio of Mexico-based female surrealists along with Frida Kahlo and Remedios Varo.

“She was the last great living surrealist,” said longtime friend and poet Homero Aridjis. “She was a living legend.”

Friend and promoter Dr. Isaac Masri said she died Wednesday of old age, after being hospitalized. “She had a great life, and a dignified death, as well, without suffering,” he said.

“She created mythical worlds in which magical beings and animals occupy the main stage, in which cobras merge with goats and blind crows become trees,” the National Arts Council wrote, adding, “These were some of the images that sprang from a mind obsessed with portraying a reality that transcends what can be seen.”

She wrote magazine and newspaper articles, novels, essays and poems and made thousands of paintings, sculptures, collages and tapestries that were exhibited in Mexico City, New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Tokyo and many other artistic centers

Mexican author Elena Poniatowska was a longtime friend of the artist and wrote the novel “Leonora” based on her life.

“Leonora was truly a woman who was one of a kind,” Poniatowska said.

Carrington was born in Clayton Green, Lancashire, England, on April 6, 1917, and came to Mexico during World War II. For many years she divided her time between Mexico City, New York and Chicago, but her last longtime home and inspiration was Mexico, once famously dubbed a “surrealist country” by writer and poet Andre Breton for its colorful and sometimes grotesque costumes, masks, rituals and dances. That meshed well with the surrealists, whose works were marked by irony, non sequiturs, strange juxtapositions and fantasy.

Carrington largely shunned public events but enjoyed inviting friends for tea at an old house in the city’s bohemian Roma neighborhood.

University of Manchester teaching fellow Joanna Pawlik, who works with the Center for the Study of Surrealism, noted that Carrington joined the surrealists in the 1930s, well after the group published its first manifesto in 1924. Pawlik noted that at least one other artist who worked with the surrealists, U.S. artist Dorothea Tanning, is still alive.

Born to a wealthy family, Carrington was the second of four children of an English textile-maker and an Irish mother who painted small murals as a hobby.

When she was 9, Leonora became so rebellious the family sent her to religious schools, where she was expelled for misbehavior.

Later they sent her to a boarding school in Florence, Italy, and then to a private school for young ladies in Paris. She was miserable in both.

In the mid-1930s, she lived with Ernst in Paris, where she became friends with Breton, the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, and other members of the surrealist inner circle. She held her first surrealist painting exhibits in 1938 in both Paris and Amsterdam.

War broke out with Nazi Germany and in 1939, Ernst was imprisoned at a concentration camp in Largentiere as an enemy alien by the French authorities.

The following year, Carrington fled to Spain. She caused a scandal at the British Embassy in Madrid, loudly threatening to plot to kill Adolph Hitler, and was committed to an insane asylum in Santander, from which she eventually escaped and made her way to Lisbon.

Carrington was saved by writer Renato Leduc, whom she had met during her Paris days when he was working as a Mexican consulate official. They married — apparently to get Carrington out of Europe — and went to New York and later to Mexico City.

She became a Mexican citizen; she and Leduc divorced, and she married her second husband, the Hungarian-born writer-photographer Emerico “Chiki” Weisz, in 1946. They had two children, one of whom, Pablo, eventually became a painter in his own right.

In Mexico, she befriended the poet and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, Frida Kahlo and her husband, the irascible muralist Diego Rivera, the late Spanish movie producer-director Luis Bunuel and many others.

Carrington took her two sons and left Mexico in 1968 in protest against the army’s Oct. 2 massacre of demonstrating university students, but returned a year later.

In 1971, she went to Canada and Scotland to study Buddhism under a Tibetan monk in exile, then came back to Mexico City. She left again for New York after two earthquakes devastated the city in September 1985, and three years later moved to Chicago.

She returned to Mexico a couple of years after that.

The artist is survived by two sons, Gabriel and Pablo. Her body was taken to a Mexico City funeral home for viewing, and she was buried Thursday at the city’s British cemetery.

How the test works: Click here to download graphic (120k)

Read the full story here

John Chowning, left, with Max Mathews

In 1957, Max Mathews invented a program that allowed a mainframe computer to play a 17-second musical composition. The technical breakthrough is still reverberating.

Max Mathews, who has been called the “father of computer music,” died of pneumonia in San Francisco on April 21. He was 84.

Mathews was a Stanford professor emeritus of music at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), where he remained brilliantly inventive and innovative into his last days.

“He imagined and created his own magical world and first built the essential concepts and tools that allowed us all to do the same,” said John Chowning, the founding director of CCRMA (pronounced “karma”) and another pivotal figure in computer music.

“There are so many institutions and individuals whose paths and lives would certainly have taken a different turn but for Max.”

Though computer music is at the edge of the avant-garde today, its roots go back to 1957, when Mathews wrote the first version of “Music,” a program that allowed an IBM 704 mainframe computer to play a 17-second composition.

He quickly realised, as he put it in a 1963 article in Science, “There are no theoretical limits to the performance of the computer as a source of musical sounds.”

The article inspired Chowning, at that time a 29-year-old who had never seen a computer. After taking a programming course for non-engineers, he sought out Mathews in New Jersey.

“He provided encouragement and the program that he described in the Science article, in the form of a box of punch cards.”

The assistance was characteristic of the man who was “very generous intellectually and personally,” said Chowning. While modestly refusing center stage, Mathews could alter the path of a student with a sentence or two.

He trained as a radio technician in the Navy and studied electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1950. He earned a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1954.

He joined the acoustics and behavioural research department of Bell Labs in New Jersey in 1955 (from 1962 to 1985, he was director of its Acoustical and Behavioral Research Center). At Bell, he and other researchers figured out how to digitize speech and, using a computer, turn the bits back into sound waves. Mathews thought of adapting this process to music and wrote a program making the technology available to non-scientists.

He invited composers to try it out. In 1994, after he had moved to CCRMA, he told Wired, “We had decks of punch cards on which the computer scores were produced, which we would carry around in boxes.”

In those early days in New Jersey, the researchers would put the boxes in a car, drive to IBM in Manhattan and, renting a mainframe computer at $600 an hour, “we would queue up,” Matthews told Wired. “Then, when it was our turn, we would run down the stairs, stick our cards in the deck and press the button.” They would take the resulting digital sound samples back to Bell Labs.

“The timbres and notes were not inspiring, but the technical breakthrough is still reverberating,” he said to a conference at Indiana University 40 years later.

The reverberations were evident after science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke visited Bell Labs and listened as a voice recorder synthesiser performed a rendition of “Daisy Bell” – the feat was immortalised in the 1968 classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the computer HAL 9000 sings the song as it is dismantled.

Mathews developed several generations of “Music,” leading to programs such as Csound, Cmix and Max, the last a program named for Mathews in the 1980s.

Mathews also invented the “Radio Baton and Conductor Program,” a precursor of the handheld controllers eventually developed by Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft to direct activities on a computer screen.

He collaborated with avant-garde composers Edgard Varèse and John Cage. With composer and conductor Pierre Boulez, he helped found Paris’ Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in the 1970s and served as a scientific advisor. He called it one of the world’s two leading centres for research in computer music; the other is CCRMA.

When he retired from Bell Labs in 1987, he joined CCRMA. It is said that if Mathews is the father of computer music, CCRMA is the house where it grew up. Chowning puts it a little differently: “Max provided the seed and Stanford the nutrient environment.”

Mathews invented several electronic violins and a totally new instrument that he called the “daton,” a mix between a drum and a conductor’s baton. He said that “the real-time immediacy in performance and inexpensiveness of the equipment far exceeds my wildest dreams.”

According to Chris Chafe, director of CCRMA since 1996, Mathews’ final work involved a sound project to create synthetic resonances, a building block for sound, using a mathematical algorithm called phasor filters.

Despite the sophistication of his generations of software and electronic inventions, Mathews’ view of his own achievements could be disarmingly simple: “I think of myself as an instrument maker or inventor, and I try to persuade musicians and composers to use my instruments,” he once said.

He is survived by his wife, Marjorie, of San Francisco; three sons, Vernon of San Francisco, Guy of Palo Alto and Boyd of Berkeley Heights, N.J.; and six grandchildren.

She loved writing, and volunteered many hours supporting the establishment of the groundbreaking environmental magazine Green Connections (produced and published in Castlemaine) where she had several articles published. Her account of building and living in a solar passive home was published in Owner Builder … and more recently she contributed to Castlemaine Independent.

The service will be at Mount Alexander Funerals – 12  Campbell Street, Castlemaine on Wednesday, 4 May at 11am.

(And we didn’t publish a poignant email that Eleanor sent to CI back on 6 December last year. Call it prescient, call it heart-rending. Here it is now. I hope this is not betraying a trust. We wish you the best in your journey through the stars, Eleanor. Your eccentric punctuation used to drive me spare, so here it is in all its glory – Ed)

I live in this beautiful town because this’s where my GP lives & works ,  & it’s where the department of Human Services has seen fit to offer me a unit for rental .
It’s also where I’ve discovered so many like-minded friends , since moving here 18 years ago , where I can , sometimes , be utterly at peace with the world , & sometimes killing like a tiger or screaming like a crazed stallion .
But most of all , I live here because this is the last town my two kids were alive  in , before they were killed in a car accident 25 years ago .

And I intend to join them here whenever that will be , but not just yet , I hope .

Farewell Almena Lomax

Award-winning journalist Almena Lomax recently died in Pasadena, California, at the age of 95. Lomax was a pioneering black journalist in Southern California, who founded the Los Angeles Tribune and was a leading civil rights activist in the region.

From the AP obituary:

In 1941, Lomax borrowed $100 from her future father-in-law to found the Los Angeles Tribune, which operated for two decades and at its peak had a circulation of 25,000.

The newspaper had a reputation for feisty and fearless reporting, with articles about the movie industry and Los Angeles police racism. Its contributors were multiracial, including Japanese-Americans Wakako Yamauchi and Hisaye Yamamoto DeSoto, who had been held in camps for Japanese-Americans in World War II and later went on to become distinguished writers.

Lomax was the mother of former Los Angeles Police Commission president Melanie Lomax, who died in 2006.

Farewell Mer Khamis

Filmmaker, actor and theatre veteran Juliano Mer-Khamis was shot and killed Monday night in the West Bank city of Jenin on Monday. He was a well-known Arab-Israeli actor, director and political activist, and was gunned down in the West Bank town where he ran a drama school and community theatre, Palestinian police said.

Juliano Mer Khamis was shot five times by one or more militants, according to Jenin police chief Mohammed Tayyim. The shooting took place about 50 metres away from the theatre.

The Jerusalem Post reports that a masked assailant shot him at close range near the theatre, which he established in 2006. The drama centre, in the Palestinian Refugee Camp, had been firebombed in 2009.

The 52-year-old actor, who recently appeared in Julian Schnabel’s Miral, was the founder of the Freedom Theatre. His other film credits include The Little Drummer Girl with Diane Keaton, Amos Gitai’s Kippur, and Avi Nesher’s Rage and Glory. In Miral he played Sheikh Saabah.

Palestinian Authority officials have now arrested a Hamas operative who is suspected of being involved in the killing. Authorities had arrested other suspects but released them.

Mer Khamis, 52, was the son of a Jewish mother and an Arab father – a rarity in a land where the two populations almost never intermarry. His split identity fuelled a long career as an actor and a vocal activist against Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians. He starred in several critically acclaimed Israeli films.

In 2006, he opened an amateur theatre company in Jenin, a city which had been torn by violence during the second Palestinian uprising after 2000.

He saw the company, known as the Freedom Theater, as a way of restoring normality to the town’s youth and opening their minds to the world beyond the harshness of their immediate surroundings. His mother, an Israeli Jew, had run a youth theatre in Jenin years before.

The theatre drew criticism and vandalism from some Palestinians who were suspicious of Mer Khamis, an Israeli citizen, and saw the theatre as a threat to their traditions.

“We lack a culture of criticism. We lack a culture of free-thinking,” Mer Khamis said in 2009, when his company put on a production of Animal Farm. “One of our roles is to challenge this,” he said.

Mer Khamis said he had planned to stage The Lieutenant of Inishmore, a satire of armed resistance, but shelved the idea after someone smashed the window of his car.

After the shooting, a Palestinian ambulance took his body to a nearby checkpoint to be transferred into Israel.

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said: “We cannot stand silent in the face of this ugly crime. It constitutes a grave violation that goes beyond all principles and human values, and it contravenes the customs and ethics of coexistence.”

He is survived by his wife, who is pregnant with twins.