Who's Next To Croak?

[Ravi]

http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/11/11/arafat.main/index.html

Arafat's body en route to funeral in Egypt
West Bank burial expected for Palestinian leaderThursday, November 11, 2004 Posted: 3:01 PM EST (2001 GMT)

 
 
PARIS, France (CNN) -- Following a French military ceremony on Thursday, the body of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat departed for Egypt hours after the leader died of a lengthy and unknown illness at a Paris hospital.

News of the Cairo memorial service prompted national leaders and representatives from around the world to travel to Egypt for Friday's funeral.

The 75-year-old Arafat had spent his life seeking a homeland for his people but was seen by Israelis as a terrorist and roadblock to peace.

"The last two days were very painful, very difficult days," said Saeb Erakat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, who confirmed Arafat's death Thursday morning. "And now, after these painful days of President Arafat, he is dead."

Arafat died at 3:30 a.m. (9:30 p.m. Wednesday ET), days after suffering a brain hemorrhage and coma. He was admitted to the hospital October 29, with a blood ailment and digestive problems that were never clearly described.

As word spread of Arafat's death, Palestinians gathered in the streets in the West Bank and Gaza and at his former headquarters in Ramallah.

Although his death leaves no clear successor in the often fractious world of Palestinian politics, Palestinian parliament speaker Rawhi Fattuh has been sworn in as interim president of the Palestinian Authority.

Fattuh praised Arafat's leadership, calling him "a man of peace," and promised to follow in his footsteps.

Elections to find a permanent replacement for Arafat are set to take place within 60 days.

During Arafat's illness, Prime Minister Ahmed Qorei was in charge of the Palestinian Authority, while Mahmoud Abbas led the Palestine Liberation Organization's executive committee.

Early Thursday, the PLO's executive committee unanimously approved Abbas, a former Palestinian prime minister, to replace Arafat as PLO chairman.

A military funeral is scheduled to take place near Cairo's airport Friday at 11 a.m. (4 a.m. ET), amid three days of official mourning in Egypt, according to a spokesman for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Arafat was born in Cairo in 1929.

Arafat's body is then expected to be taken for burial Friday to the West Bank city of Ramallah aboard an Egyptian military helicopter, the spokesman said.

Israel refused Arafat's request to be buried in Jerusalem, but agreed to allow his interment at his Ramallah compound, where he had been confined for nearly three years before falling ill.

Israel has ordered a general closure of the West Bank and Gaza, according to the Israel Defense Forces, as the region prepares for the burial.

Arafat won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, along with Israeli leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, for their work on the Oslo accords, seen at the time as a breakthrough that could lead to an independent Palestinian state and a permanent peace.

Erakat called it "heartbreaking" that Arafat died before achieving his goal of an independent Palestinian state, "and the Israeli occupation of our land has not finished yet."

But he said Arafat managed to preserve Palestinian national identity during decades without a state of their own.

Erakat vowed that the grave in Ramallah would be temporary.

"One day, we will have our own independent state with east Jerusalem as its capital," he said.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon responded to news of Arafat's death Thursday saying, "The recent events could be a historic turning point for the Middle East. Israel is a country that seeks peace and will continue in its efforts to reach a peace deal with the Palestinians without delay.

"I hope that the new Palestinian leadership ... will understand that the advancement of the relations ... depends first and foremost on them stopping terror."

In a statement, U.S. President Bush called Arafat's death "a significant moment in Palestinian history.

"We express our condolences to the Palestinian people. For the Palestinian people, we hope that the future will bring peace and the fulfillment of their aspirations for an independent, democratic Palestine that is at peace with its neighbors.

"During the period of transition that is ahead, we urge all in the region and throughout the world to join in helping make progress toward these goals and toward the ultimate goal of peace."

Across five decades, Arafat -- adorned with his trademark checkered kaffiyeh -- was the most prominent face of Palestinian opposition to Israel, first as the head of the PLO, which carried out terrorist attacks against Israeli targets, and later as the head of the quasi-governmental Palestinian Authority, after parts of the West Bank and Gaza were returned to Palestinian control.

Arafat is survived by his widow, Suha Tawil, whom he married in 1991, and their daughter, Zahwa, who was born in 1995.

[El Duderino]

i always come here thinking it's gonna be a real star.

[Stefen]

ODB is dead.

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1493725/20041113/ol_dirty_bastard.jhtml?headlines=true

Rapper Ol' Dirty Bastard Dies
11.13.2004 7:56 PM EST

Sources close to ODB said he had been complaining of chest pains earlier in the day.

Ol' Dirty Bastard, a founding member of the Wu-Tang Clan, died of unknown causes on Saturday (November 13) in New York, according to his spokesperson. He was 35.

Sources close to the rapper (whose real name was Russell Tyrone Jones) said he had been complaining of chest pains earlier in the day, although no further details are available as of yet. ODB had been scheduled to perform with Wu-Tang Clan at a concert in New Jersey on Friday night, but missed the show.

Another source reported that ODB arrived in the New York area on a flight from Denver at 10:30 p.m. Friday. He went to a Manhattan studio (having missed the concert), and collapsed within an hour of arriving there.

A statement was released Saturday evening by ODB's mother, Cherry Jones. "This evening, I received a phone call that is every mother's worst dream," she said. "My son, Russell Jones, passed away. To the public, he was known as Ol' Dirty Bastard, but to me, he was known as Rusty, the kindest, most generous soul on earth. I appreciate all the support and prayers that I have received. Russell was more than a rapper, he was a loving father, brother, uncle, and most of all, son."

Damon Dash, who signed ODB to Roc-A-Fella Records last fall, also released a statement. "All of us in the Roc-A-Fella family are shocked and saddened by the sudden and tragic death or our brother and friend," Dash said. "Russell inspired all of us with his spirit, wit and tremendous heart. He will be missed dearly, and our thoughts, prayers and deepest condolences go out to his wonderful family. The world has lost a great talent, but we mourn the loss of our friend."

Dirty, easily the most eccentric of the nine Wu-Tang Clan rappers (if not in all of hip-hop), showed promise as a solo artist, but was hindered by a long series of clashes with the law, which ranged from shoplifting to making terrorist threats.

The rapper, who also went by several unusual aliases (including Osirus, Joe Bannanas [sic], Dirt McGirt, Dirt Dog, Unique Ason and Big Baby Jesus), was released from prison last year. He had served a two-year term for parole violation and drug charges.

After his release from prison and psychiatric care, ODB signed with the Roc and was recording as Dirt McGirt (see "Ol' Dirty Bastard Hits Campaign Trail With New Album"). Most recently, he collaborated with Macy Gray for the album (see "ODB Duets With Macy Gray On 'Don't Go Breaking My Heart' ").

After several years apart, Wu-Tang reunited this summer for a concert in California. A recording of the show, titled Disciples of the 36 Chambers: Chapter 1, was released in September.

MTV News will have more on this story as it develops.

Ol' Dirty Rocks Like Elton John At First Post-Jail Live Show

Ol' Dirty Lays Down Track With Pharrell Before Turning Into A Pumpkin

Ol' Dirty Bastard Now Dirt McGirt, Signs To Roc-A-Fella

ODB Rejoins Society (Kind Of); Set To Drop New LPs, 'Ol' Dirty Drawers'

[Pubrick]

damn. i was listening to dogshit yesterday..

[hedwig]

that brought tears to my eyes.

i'm not joking.

OBD RIP  

[Ghostboy]

Damn. Time to pop in the the 36 Chambers and give it a reflective spin.

[meatwad]

and i was hoping fot that one last really great wu tang album.

he will be missed

[eward]

"Russell inspired all of us with his spirit, wit and tremendous heart."

...was hindered by a long series of clashes with the law, which ranged from shoplifting to making terrorist threats....

anyways RIP

[mogwai]

no!!

[ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ]

The weirdest part of all of this...

I was looking through some old CD's I hadn't listened to in a long time, so I tossed in one of their more recent CD's "Wu-Tang Clan - The W", and I was thinking about how it's sad that ODB wasn't in it, and I was about to look for some older Wu-Tang to listen to ODB because I always liked him, and I read this just after the thought crossed my mind.

Freaky.

[MacGuffin]

My condolences to SHAFTR:

Colombier, Who Scored 'Purple Rain,' Dies

Michel Colombier, who scored more than 100 movies and television productions including "White Nights," "Against All Odds," and "Purple Rain," has died. He was 65.

Colombier, who also composed chamber music pieces and more than 20 ballets, died Sunday of cancer at his home in Santa Monica.

Colombier was French-born and was often called the "godfather of French fusion" or, in Japan, "Fusion-sama."
 
He had the versatility to write classical phrases for Mikhail Baryshnikov's ballet steps in "White Nights," collaborate with Prince on futuristic rock sounds for "Purple Rain," and create gritty, rhythmic music for "New Jack City."

Colombier was classically trained as a pianist at the Paris Conservatory. He performed on the soundtracks of some of the films he scored, including "The Golden Child" a 1986 movie starring Eddie Murphy.

Other films with his music include "The Money Pit" with Tom Hanks, "Ruthless People" with Danny DeVito and Bette Midler, "Surrender" with Sally Field and Michael Caine, "How Stella Got Her Groove Back" with Angela Bassett and "Swept Away" with Madonna.

His television work included the "Desperado" series for NBC in the late 1980s and HBO's "Tales From the Crypt." He directed such top orchestras as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Paris Opera and the London Symphony.

His awards included the Cesar, the Edison Prize and a Tokyo Music Award.

Colombier is survived by his wife, Dana; six children, Christian, Agathe, David, Emily, Siena and Arabella; and a sister, Marie-Francoise Hoessler.

A memorial observance was being planned.

[cine]

Actor John Barrymore dead at 72

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- John Drew Barrymore, the sometimes troubled heir to an acting dynasty and absent father of movie star Drew Barrymore, died Monday. He was 72.

"He was a cool cat. Please smile when you think of him," Drew Barrymore said in a statement issued by her publicist's office.

No information was released about the cause of death or where in Los Angeles he died.

John D. Barrymore was part of an acting clan that included his father, the famed stage and early film actor John Barrymore, and his father's siblings, Lionel Barrymore and Ethel Barrymore. Drew Barrymore was his daughter by his third wife, Ildiko Jaid Barrymore.

John D. Barrymore was born in Beverly Hills on June 4, 1932. His mother was actress Dolores Costello.

He started his career while a teenager, appearing professionally first as John Barrymore Jr. and then as John Drew Barrymore. He had movie roles in the 1950s in "The Sundowners," "High Lonesome," "Quebec," "The Big Night," "Thunderbirds" and "While the City Sleeps."

But along the way there were problems with drugs, drunken driving and violence, domestic and otherwise. By the early 1960s he had left Hollywood for Italy to work in European movies.

In a 1962 interview with The Associated Press in Rome he made no apologies for headline-grabbing street brawls there.

"I'm not a nice, clean-cut American kid at all," he said. "I'm just a human being. Those things just happen."

By 1964 he had been married twice, to Cara Williams and to Italian actress Gabriella Palazollo, and had returned to Hollywood after making more than a dozen films overseas -- none of them any good by his own estimation.

By then his billing had become John Drew Barrymore, perhaps to step out of his father's shadow.

"I don't mind if my acting is compared to him," he said in an AP interview. "The trouble is that people expect me to live like him."

Later, Barrymore had sporadic film and television roles.

As a teenage star battling alcoholism herself, Drew Barrymore wrote about her father in the memoir "Little Girl Lost." He was depicted as menacing, showing up only to abuse his daughter and former wife and ask for money.

"The little bit of relationship that there was was very abusive and just chaotic," Drew Barrymore told the AP in 1990.

Still, she said, "I had this fantasy in my mind, that I was going to have 'Father Knows Best' walk through the door. I wanted that so bad, and I wasn't going to face reality that it wasn't going to happen."

John D. Barrymore is also survived by a son, John Barrymore III, by his first wife.

[Stefen]

Scott Peterson sentenced to death. Owned.

[cine]

Somewhere in the world, there's a Godardian crying...


Author Susan Sontag dies at 71
Leading thinker wrote 'On Photography,' 'Notes on Camp'

NEW YORK (AP) -- Susan Sontag, the author, activist and self-defined "zealot of seriousness" whose voracious mind and provocative prose made her a leading intellectual of the past half century, died Tuesday. She was 71.

Sontag died at 7:10 a.m. Tuesday, said Esther Carver, a spokeswoman for Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan.

The hospital declined to release a cause of death. Sontag had been treated for breast cancer in the 1970s.

Sontag called herself a "besotted aesthete," an "obsessed moralist" and a "zealot of seriousness." Tall and commanding, her very presence suggested grand, passionate drama: eyes the richest brown; thick, black hair accented by a bolt of white; the voice deep and assured; her expression a severe stare or a wry smile, as if amused by a joke only she could tell.

She wrote a best-selling historical novel, "The Volcano Lover," and in 2000 won the National Book Award for the historical novel "In America." But her greatest literary impact was as an essayist.

The 1964 piece "Notes on Camp," which established her as a major new writer, popularized the "so bad it's good" attitude toward popular culture, applicable to everything from "Swan Lake" to feather boas. In "Against Interpretation," this most analytical of writers worried that critical analysis interfered with art's "incantatory, magical" power.

She also wrote such influential works as "Illness as Metaphor," in which she examined how disease had been alternately romanticized and demonized, and "On Photography," in which she argued pictures sometimes distance viewers from the subject matter. "On Photography" received a National Book Critics Circle award in 1978. "Regarding the Pain of Others," a partial refutation of "On Photography," was an NBCC finalist in 2004.

She read authors from all over the world and is credited with introducing such European intellectuals as Roland Barthes and Elias Canetti to American readers.

"I know of no other intellectual who is so clear-minded with a capacity to link, to connect, to relate," Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican novelist, once said. "She is unique."

Unlike many American writers, she was deeply involved in politics, even after the 1960s. From 1987-89, Sontag served as president of American chapter of the writers organization PEN. When the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called for Salman Rushdie's death because of the alleged blasphemy of "The Satanic Verses," she helped lead protests in the literary community.

Sontag campaigned relentlessly for human rights and throughout the 1990s traveled to the region of Yugoslavia, calling for international action against the growing civil war. In 1993, she visited Sarajevo and staged a production of "Waiting for Godot."

Reading and writing
The daughter of a fur trader, she was born Susan Rosenblatt in New York in 1933, and also spent her early years in Tucson, Arizona, and Los Angeles. Her mother was an alcoholic; her father died when she was 5. Her mother later married an Army officer, Capt. Nathan Sontag.

Susan Sontag remembered her childhood as "one long prison sentence." She skipped three grades and graduated from high school at 15; the principal told her she was wasting her time there. Her mother, meanwhile, warned if she did not stop reading she would never marry.

Her mother was wrong. At the University of Chicago, she attended a lecture by Philip Rieff, a social psychologist and historian. They were married 10 days later. She was 17, he 28. "He was passionate, he was bookish, he was pure," she later said of him.

By the mid-1960s, she and Rieff were divorced (they had a son, David, born in 1952), and Sontag had emerged in New York's literary society. She was known for her essays, but also wrote fiction, although not so successfully at first. "Death Kit" and "The Benefactor" were experimental novels few found worth getting through.

"Unfortunately, Miss Sontag's intelligence is still greater than her talent," Gore Vidal wrote in a 1967 review of "Death Kit."

"Yet ... once she has freed herself of literature, she will have the power to make it, and there are not many American writers one can say that of."

Her fiction became more accessible. She wrote an acclaimed short story about AIDS, "The Way We Live Now," and a best-selling novel, "The Volcano Lover," about Lord Nelson and his mistress Lady Hamilton.

In 2000, her novel "In America," about the 19th-century Polish actress Helena Modjeska, was a commercial disappointment and was criticized for the uncredited use of material from fiction and nonfiction sources. Nonetheless, Sontag won the National Book Award.

Unrestrained
Sontag's work also included making the films "Duet For Cannibals" and "Brother Carl" and writing the play "Alice in Bed," based on the life of Alice James, the ailing sister of Henry and William James. Sontag appeared as herself in Woody Allen's mock documentary, "Zelig."

In 1999 she wrote an essay for "Women," a compilation of portraits by her longtime companion, photographer Annie Leibovitz.

Sontag did not practice the art of restrained discourse. Writing in the 1960s about the Vietnam War she declared "the white race is the cancer of human history." Days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, she criticized U.S. foreign policy and offered backhanded praise for the hijackers.

"Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?" she wrote in The New Yorker.

"In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards."

Even among sympathetic souls, she found reason to contend. At a 1998 dinner, she was one of three given a Writers For Writers Award for contributions to others in the field. Sontag spoke after fellow guest of honor E.L. Doctorow, who urged writers to treat each other as "colleagues" and worried about the isolation of what he called "print culture."

"I agree with Mr. Doctorow that we are all colleagues, but there are perhaps too many of us," Sontag stated.

"Nobody has to be a writer. Print culture may be under siege, but there has been an enormous inflation in the number of books printed, and very few of these could be considered part of literature. ... Unlike what has been said here before, for me the primary obligation is human solidarity."

[edison]

NEW YORK - "Law & Order" star Jerry Orbach has died of prostate cancer at 69, a representative of the show said Wednesday.

Orbach died Tuesday night in Manhattan after several weeks of treatment, Audrey Davis of the public relations agency Lippin Group said.

When his illness was diagnosed, he had begun production on NBC's upcoming spinoff "Law & Order: Trial By Jury," after 12 seasons playing Detective Lennie Briscoe in the original series. His return to the new show had been expected early next year.

On Broadway, the Bronx-born Orbach starred in hit musicals including "Carnival," "Promises, Promises" (for which he won a Tony Award), "Chicago" and "42nd Street."

Among his film appearances were roles in "Dirty Dancing," "Prince of the City" and "Crimes and Misdemeanors."