George Jones Dead at Age 81

FILE – In this Jan. 10, 2007 file photo, George Jones is shown in Nashville, Tenn. Jones, the peerless, hard-living country singer who recorded dozens of hits about good times and regrets and peaked with the heartbreaking classic “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” has died. He was 81. Jones died Friday, April 26, 2013 at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville after being hospitalized with fever and irregular blood pressure, according to his publicist Kirt Webster. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey, file)

Associated Press/Mark Humphrey, file – FILE – In this Jan. 10, 2007 file photo, George Jones is shown in Nashville, Tenn. Jones, the peerless, hard-living country singer who recorded dozens of hits about good …more

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FILE – In this Nov. 7, 2001 file photo, Garth Brooks, left, and George Jones, center, perform their duet “Beer Run” at the Country Music Association Awards show in Nashville, Tenn. The fiddle player at right is unidentified. Jones, the peerless, hard-living country singer who recorded dozens of hits about good times and regrets and peaked with the heartbreaking classic “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” has died. He was 81. Jones died Friday, April 26, 2013 at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville after being hospitalized with fever and irregular blood pressure, according to his publicist Kirt Webster.(AP Photo/M. Spencer Green, file)View Photo

FILE – In this Nov. 7, 2001 file photo, Garth Brooks, left, and George Jones, center, …
FILE – In this June 16, 1997 file photo, Country music veteran George Jones bends an ear toward 14-year-old newcomer LeAnn Rimes during the opening segment of the TNN-Music City News Country Awards show in Nashville, Tenn., Jones, the peerless, hard-living country singer who recorded dozens of hits about good times and regrets and peaked with the heartbreaking classic “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” has died. He was 81. Jones died Friday, April 26, 2013 at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville after being hospitalized with fever and irregular blood pressure, according to his publicist Kirt Webster. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey, file)View Photo

FILE – In this June 16, 1997 file photo, Country music veteran George Jones bends …
FILE – In this Jan. 10, 2007 file photo, George Jones is shown in Nashville, Tenn. Jones, the peerless, hard-living country singer who recorded dozens of hits about good times and regrets and peaked with the heartbreaking classic “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” has died. He was 81. Jones died Friday, April 26, 2013 at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville after being hospitalized with fever and irregular blood pressure, according to his publicist Kirt Webster. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey, file)View Photo

FILE – In this Jan. 10, 2007 file photo, George Jones is shown in Nashville, Tenn. …
FILE – In this April 1996 file photo, George Jones is shown in Nashville. Jones, the peerless, hard-living country singer who recorded dozens of hits about good times and regrets and peaked with the heartbreaking classic “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” has died. He was 81. Jones died Friday, April 26, 2013 at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville after being hospitalized with fever and irregular blood pressure, according to his publicist Kirt Webster. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey, file)View Photo

FILE – In this April 1996 file photo, George Jones is shown in Nashville. Jones, …
FILE – In this Sept. 12, 2006 file photo, Country music legend George Jones waves to the crowd during his 75th birthday celebration at the Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville, Tenn., on Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2006. From left are Joe Diffie; Jones’ wife, Nancy; Craig Morgan; Jones; Tanya Tucker; and Joe Nichols. Jones, the peerless, hard-living country singer who recorded dozens of hits about good times and regrets and peaked with the heartbreaking classic “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” has died. He was 81. Jones died Friday, April 26, 2013 at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville after being hospitalized with fever and irregular blood pressure, according to his publicist Kirt Webster.(AP Photo/Mark Humphrey, file)View Photo

FILE – In this Sept. 12, 2006 file photo, Country music legend George Jones waves …
FILE – In this April 30, 1981 file photo, Country singer George Jones, winner of top male vocalist award at the Academy of Country Music Awards, poses with his daughter Georgette, in Los Angeles, Calif. Jones, the peerless, hard-living country singer who recorded dozens of hits about good times and regrets and peaked with the heartbreaking classic “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” has died. He was 81. Jones died Friday, April 26, 2013 at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville after being hospitalized with fever and irregular blood pressure, according to his publicist Kirt Webster.(AP Photo/Nick Ut, file)View Photo

FILE – In this April 30, 1981 file photo, Country singer George Jones, winner of …
FILE – In this Feb. 25, 1981 file photo, Country singer George Jones poses with the Grammy he won for best male country vocal performance of “He Stopped Loving Her Today”, at the awards at Radio City Music Hall in New York. Jones, the peerless, hard-living country singer who recorded dozens of hits about good times and regrets and peaked with the heartbreaking classic “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” has died. He was 81. Jones died Friday, April 26, 2013 at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville after being hospitalized with fever and irregular blood pressure, according to his publicist Kirt Webster. (AP Photo, file)View Photo

FILE – In this Feb. 25, 1981 file photo, Country singer George Jones poses with the …
FILE – In this Sept. 30, 1992 file photo, Country music legend George Jones accepts his Country Music Hall of Fame award from Randy Travis, left, during the Country Music Association Awards show, Nashville, Tenn. Jones, the peerless, hard-living country singer who recorded dozens of hits about good times and regrets and peaked with the heartbreaking classic “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” has died. He was 81. Jones died Friday, April 26, 2013 at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville after being hospitalized with fever and irregular blood pressure, according to his publicist Kirt Webster. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey, file)View Photo

FILE – In this Sept. 30, 1992 file photo, Country music legend George Jones accepts …
FILE – In this undated photo, Country singer George Jones is shown performing with his guitar. Jones, the peerless, hard-living country singer who recorded dozens of hits about good times and regrets and peaked with the heartbreaking classic “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” has died. He was 81. Jones died Friday, April 26, 2013 at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville after being hospitalized with fever and irregular blood pressure, according to his publicist Kirt Webster. (AP Photo, File)View Photo

FILE – In this undated photo, Country singer George Jones is shown performing with …
FILE – In this Oct. 1986 file photo, George Jones accepts his 1985 award at the Country Music Association (CMA) awards show in Nashville, Tenn. Jones, the peerless, hard-living country singer who recorded dozens of hits about good times and regrets and peaked with the heartbreaking classic “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” has died. He was 81. Jones died Friday, April 26, 2013 at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville after being hospitalized with fever and irregular blood pressure, according to his publicist Kirt Webster. (AP Photo, file)View Photo

Jones, the peerless, hard-living country singer who recorded dozens of hits about good times and regrets and peaked with the heartbreaking classic “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” has died. He was 81. Jones died Friday, April 26, 2013 at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville after being hospitalized with fever and irregular blood pressure, according to his publicist Kirt Webster. (AP Photo/John Russell, file)View Photo

Other great singers have come and gone, but this fact remained inviolate until Jones passed away Friday at 81 in a Nashville hospital after a year of ill health.

“Today someone else has become the greatest living singer of traditional country music, but there will never be another George Jones,” said Bobby Braddock, the Country Music Hall of Fame songwriter who provided Jones with 29 songs over the decades. “No one in country music has influenced so many other artists.”

He did it with that voice. Rich and deep, strong enough to crack like a whip, but supple enough to bring tears. It was so powerful, it made Jones the first thoroughly modern country superstar, complete with the substance abuse problems and rich-and-famous celebrity lifestyle that included mansions, multiple divorces and — to hear one fellow performer tell it — fistfuls of cocaine.

He was a beloved and at times a notorious figure in Nashville and his problems were just as legendary as his songs. But when you dropped the needle on one of his records, all that stuff went away. And you were left with The Voice.

“He just knows how to pull every drop of emotion out of it of the songs if it’s an emotional song or if it’s a fun song he knows how to make that work,” Alan Jackson said in a 2011 interview. “It’s rare. He was a big fan of Hank Williams Sr. like me. He tried to sing like Hank in the early days. I’ve heard early cuts. And the difference is Hank was a singer and he was a great writer, but he didn’t have that natural voice like George. Not many people do. That just sets him apart from everybody.”

That voice helped Jones achieve No. 1 songs in five separate decades, 1950s to 1990s. And its qualities were admired by more than just his fellow country artists but by Frank Sinatra, Pete Townshend, Elvis Costello, James Taylor and countless others. “If we all could sound like we wanted to, we’d all sound like George Jones,” Waylon Jennings once sang.

Word of his death spread Friday morning as his peers paid tribute.

Merle Haggard put it best, perhaps: “The world has lost the greatest country singer of all time. Amen.”

“The greatest voice to ever grace country music will never die,” Garth Brooks said. “Jones has a place in every heart that ever loved any kind of music.”

And Dolly Parton added, “My heart is absolutely broken. George Jones was my all time favorite singer and one of my favorite people in the world.”

In Jones’ case, that’s not hyperbole. In a career that lasted more than 50 years, “Possum” evolved from young honky-tonker to elder statesman as he recorded more than 150 albums and became the champion and symbol of traditional country music, a well-lined link to his hero, Williams.

Jones survived long battles with alcoholism and drug addiction, brawls, accidents and close encounters with death, including bypass surgery and a tour bus crash that he only avoided by deciding at the last moment to take a plane.

His failure to appear for concerts left him with the nickname “No Show Jones,” and he later recorded a song by that name and often opened his shows by singing it. His wild life was revealed in song and in his handsome, troubled face, with its dark, deep-set eyes and dimpled chin.

In song, like life, he was rowdy and regretful, tender and tragic. His hits included the sentimental “Who’s Gonna Fill Their Shoes,” the foot-tapping “The Race is On,” the foot-stomping “I Don’t Need Your Rockin’ Chair,” the melancholy “She Thinks I Still Care,” the rockin’ “White Lightning,” and the barfly lament “Still Doing Time.” Jones also recorded several duets with Tammy Wynette, his wife for six years, including “Golden Ring,” ”Near You,” ”Southern California” and “We’re Gonna Hold On.” He also sang with such peers as Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard and with Costello and other rock performers.

But his signature song was “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” a weeper among weepers about a man who carries his love for a woman to his grave. The 1980 ballad, which Jones was sure would never be a hit, often appears on surveys as the most popular country song of all time and won the Country Music Association’s song of the year award an unprecedented two years in a row.

Jones won Grammy awards in 1981 for “He Stopped Loving Her Today” and in 1999 for “Choices.” He was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1992 and in 2008 was among the artists honored in Washington at the Kennedy Center.

He was in the midst of a yearlong farewell tour when he passed away. He was scheduled to complete the tour in November with an all-star packed tribute in Nashville. Stars lined up to sign on to the show, many remembering kindnesses over the years. Kenny Chesney thinks Jones may have one of the greatest voices in not just country history, but music history. But he remembers Jones for more than the voice. He was picked for a tour with Jones and Wynette early in his career and cherishes the memory of being invited to fly home on Jones’ private jet after one of the concerts.

“I remember sitting there on that jet, thinking, ‘This can’t be happening,’ because he was George Jones, and I was some kid from nowhere,” Chesney said in an email. “I’m sure he knew, but he was generous to kids chasing the dream, and I never forgot it.”

Jones was born Sept. 12, 1931, in a log house near the east Texas town of Saratoga, the youngest of eight children. He sang in church and at age 11 began performing for tips on the streets of Beaumont, Texas. His first outing was such a success that listeners tossed him coins, placed a cup by his side and filled it with money. Jones estimated he made more than $24 for his two-hour performance, enough to feed his family for a week, but he used up the cash at a local arcade.

“That was my first time to earn money for singing and my first time to blow it afterward,” he recalled in “I Lived to Tell it All,” a painfully self-critical memoir published in 1996. “It started what almost became a lifetime trend.”

The family lived in a government-subsidized housing project, and his father, a laborer, was an alcoholic who would rouse the children from bed in the middle of the night to sing for him. His father also noted that young George liked music and bought him a Gene Autry guitar, with a horse and lariat on the front that Jones practiced on obsessively.

He got his start on radio with husband and wife team Eddie & Pearl in the late 1940s. Hank Williams once dropped by the studio to promote a new record, and Jones was invited to back him on guitar. When it came time to play, he froze.

“Hank had ‘Wedding Bells’ out at the time,” Jones recalled in a 2003 Associated Press interview. “He started singing it, and I never hit the first note the whole song. I just stared.”

After the first of his four marriages failed, he enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1951 and served three years. He cut his first record when he got out, an original fittingly called “No Money in This Deal.”

He had his first hit with “Why Baby Why” in 1955, and by the early ’60s Jones was one of country music’s top stars.

“I sing top songs that fit the hardworking, everyday loving person. That’s what country music is about,” Jones said in a 1991 AP interview. “My fans and real true country music fans know I’m not a phony. I just sing it the way it is and put feeling in it if I can and try to live the song.”

Jones was married to Wynette, his third wife, from 1969 to 1975. (Wynette died in 1998.) Their relationship played out in Nashville like a country song, with hard drinking, fights and reconciliations. Jones’ weary knowledge of domestic warfare was immortalized in such classics as “The Battle,” set to the martial beat of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

After one argument, Jones drove off on a riding mower in search of a drink because Wynette had taken his car keys to keep him from carousing. Years earlier, married to his second wife, he had also sped off on a mower in search of a drink. Jones referred to his mowing days in the 1996 release, “Honky Tonk Song,” and poked fun at himself in four music videos that featured him aboard a mower.

His drug and alcohol abuse grew worse in the late ’70s, and Jones had to file for bankruptcy in 1978. A manager had started him on cocaine, hoping to counteract his boozy, lethargic performances, and Jones was eventually arrested in Jackson, Miss., in 1983 on cocaine possession charges. He agreed to perform a benefit concert and was sentenced to six months probation. In his memoir, “Satan is Real,” Charlie Louvin recounts being offered a fistful of cocaine by Jones backstage at a concert.

“In the 1970s, I was drunk the majority of the time,” Jones wrote in his memoir. “If you saw me sober, chances are you saw me asleep.”

In 1980, a 3-minute song changed his life. His longtime producer, Billy Sherrill, recommended he record “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” a ballad by Braddock and Curly Putnam. The song took more than a year to record, partly because Jones couldn’t master the melody, which he confused with Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make it Through the Night,” and partly because he was too drunk to recite a brief, spoken interlude (“She came to see him one last time/And we all wondered if she would/And it kept running through my mind/This time he’s over her for good.”)

“Pretty simple, eh?” Jones wrote in his memoir. “I couldn’t get it. I had been able to sing while drunk all of my life. I’d fooled millions of people. But I could never speak without slurring when drunk. What we needed to complete that song was the narration, but Billy could never catch me sober enough to record four simple spoken lines.”

Jones was convinced the song was too “morbid” to catch on. But “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” featuring a string section that hummed, then soared, became an instant standard and virtually canonized him. His concert fee jumped from $2,500 a show to $25,000.

“There is a God,” he recalled.

___

Italie contributed from New York.

Art, Entertainment, Obituaries

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April 26, 2013

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Why Big Information Technology Projects Always Go Wrong

Why big IT projects always go wrong

Fred Brook’s 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month is essential reading for any company boss about to embark upon a costly software project

John Naughton
The Observer, Saturday 20 April 2013

Wrong, said Fred … the IBM program alerted Fred Brooks to the snags inherent in big projects.

In 1975, a computer scientist named Fred Brooks published one of the seminal texts in the literature of computing. It had the intriguing title of The Mythical Man-Month and it consisted simply of a set of essays on the art of managing large software projects. Between its covers is distilled more wisdom about computing than is contained in any other volume, which is why it has never been out of print. And every government minister, civil servant and chief executive thinking about embarking on a large IT project should be obliged to read it – and answer a multiple-choice quiz afterwards.

How come? Fred Brooks was the guy who led the team that in the 1960s created the operating system for IBM’s 360 range of mainframe computers. This was probably the largest non-military software project ever mounted, and it was of vital strategic importance to IBM, which then completely dominated the computer business. It also turned out to be vastly more complex than anyone – including Fred – anticipated, and it rapidly metamorphosed into a kind of death march.

The project fell further and further behind schedule. But because IBM was a rich company and OS/360 was so important, it was able to throw more and more resources (i.e., programmers) at the task. But as it did so, the problems got worse, not better. At which point Fred Brooks had his epiphany: he realized that every time he added a programmer to the team the project fell further behind.

In the end, however, the job was done. The death march ended, OS/360 was delivered and IBM went on to make a lot of money from it. Brooks, for his part, resigned from the company, became professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and then sat down to write the book that made him famous. His aim was to distill into a set of elegant essays everything he had learned from the OS/360 experience. The striking title came from his epiphany – the realization that man-months are a hopeless metric for assessing the size of a complex software project.

Why? Basically because a big software project involves two kinds of work: the actual writing of computer code; and co-ordinating the work of the dozens – or maybe hundreds – of programmers working on different parts of the overall system. Co-ordination represents an essential but unproductive overhead: and the more programmers you have, the bigger that overhead becomes. Hence Brook’s law: adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

Over the years, fragments of Fred Brook’s wisdom have percolated into the consciousness of ministers, civil servants and chief executives. But only fragments. In Britain we are wearily familiar with the long, dreary catalog of botched or outlandishly expensive government IT projects. This is not just a public sector problem, however. Research conducted by two Oxford academics and published in the Harvard Business Review suggests that the private sector has almost as much difficulty managing big software projects, and that some such projects have even endangered the survival of the companies that embarked upon them.

A case in point was the venerable clothing manufacturer Levi Strauss. In 2003 it was a global corporation, with operations in more than 110 countries but with an IT system that was an antiquated, “Balkanized” mix of incompatible country-specific systems. So its bosses decided to migrate to a single SAP system and hired a team of fancy consultants (from Deloitte) to lead the effort. “The risks seemed small,” wrote the researchers. “The proposed budget was less than $5m.” But very quickly things fell apart. One major customer, Walmart, required that the system interface with its supply chain management system, creating additional work. During the switchover to the new system, Levi Strauss was unable to fulfill orders and had to close its three US distribution centers for a week. In 2008, the company took a $192.5m charge against earnings to compensate for the botched project — and fired its chief information officer.

The Oxford researchers examined more than 1,400 big IT projects – comparing their budgets and estimated performance benefits with the actual costs and results. The average project cost $167m and the largest a whopping $33 bn. The researchers’ sample drew heavily on US-based projects but found little difference between them and European projects. Likewise, they found little difference between private companies and public agencies. One in six had a cost overrun of 200%.

The message is clear: if you run a big company or a government department and are contemplating a big IT product, ask yourself this question: can your company or your ministerial career survive if the project goes over budget by 40% or more, or if only 25-50% of the projected benefits are realized? If the answer is “no” go back to square one. And read Fred Brook’s lovely book.

Book Reviews, Books of note, computer technology, Science and Technology, Supply Chain Management, Thinking and Intelligence

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April 21, 2013

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Focusing on Chechnya

Boston Attacks Turn Spotlight on Troubled Region of Chechnya
By PETER BAKER and C. J. CHIVERS
Published: April 20, 2013

WASHINGTON — The possible motivations of the two brothers linked to the Boston Marathon bombings are as yet publicly unknown. Of Chechen heritage, they lived in the United States for years, according to friends and relatives, and no direct ties have been publicly established with known Chechen terrorist or separatist groups.

Yet, with at least one brother talking of Chechen nationalism on the Internet, their reported involvement in the marathon attack throws a spotlight back on one of the darkest corners of nationalist and Islamic militancy, and to a campaign for separatism and vengeance responsible for some of the most unsparing terrorist acts of recent decades.

Fired by a potent mix of blood codes, separatist yearnings and Islamic militancy, Chechen groups have staged a string of intermittent but spectacular attacks in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia since the 1990s. They have bombed trains, planes and subways, attacked a rock concert and slammed a truck bomb into a hospital. In 2002, they seized a crowded theater in Moscow, an attack that culminated in a commando raid that killed 130 hostages.

In the spring of 2004, a bomb placed in a stadium in Grozny, the regional capital, killed the Kremlin’s handpicked Chechen president. That summer, female suicide bombers with hand grenades brought down two Russian passenger jets nearly simultaneously, killing 90 people.

Days later, a group of terrorists working for Shamil Basayev, the one-legged separatist military commander who was then Russia’s most wanted man, stormed a public school in the small town of Beslan, in a nearby republic, leading to the deaths of more than 300 people, most of them schoolchildren, their parents and their teachers.

Such violence had typically been confined within Russia.

Reports, often based on little more than rumors or Kremlin-sourced leaks, of extensive Chechen involvement in terrorism or insurgencies elsewhere have been a staple of public commentary on such violence since 2001.

These reports — of Chechen snipers and bomb-makers appearing in one conflict after another, and of Chechens filling the ranks of armed groups in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere — often proved to be exaggerated.

Chechnya’s battles with Russia and against Russian rule had been fought in recurring if irregular cycles for centuries; Chechens did not have to travel to find their foes, much less their targets. In interviews many Chechen emigrants and fighters have emphasized that they consider their enemies to be local, not foreign.

But in time outside influences crept into the North Caucasus’s homegrown war, and the moves and countermoves between Russians and Chechens spread beyond Russia’s borders.

Two wars erupted between Russia and Chechen separatists in the 1990s. The first had old roots. Many Chechens, an independent Muslim people of the highlands, have long chafed at what they view as Russia’s imperial rule. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the breakup of the Warsaw Pact, Chechen separatists perceived a fresh chance to claim their own state.

Chechnya’s oil reserves provided an incentive for both sides to refuse to yield their claims, and Islam colored the fight. Arab fighters appeared in Chechnya with the onset of the first war, saying they had come to help fellow Muslims fight oppression.

By the mid- and late-1990s, several training camps operated almost openly in rural Chechnya, led in part by a foreign jihadi, Ibn al-Khattab.

Later, however, many Chechens said the Arab influence had declined amid tensions between the Sufi Chechens and Sunni Arabs, who typically adhere to different Islamic traditions and practices. In addition, the allure of the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, Chechens say, drew many Arab fighters away from Chechnya’s mountains.

And yet the ripple effects of the Chechen wars eventually played out in 2004 in the Arab emirate of Qatar, where Russian agents assassinated an exiled Chechen leader with a car bomb, and on the streets of Vienna in 2009 when Chechens gunned down a fellow Chechen who had broken from the Kremlin-supported leadership in the republic to file a complaint in the European Court of Human Rights. The complaint detailed torture by the Russian-backed security services, and the republic’s current president, Ramzan A. Kadyrov.

Just a week ago, the United States put Mr. Kadyrov, a former rebel turned ally of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and the primary subject of the torture complaint, on a secret list of Russian citizens banned from the United States for human rights abuses, according to people briefed on the list.

Curiously, the most political of the video clips posted on social media by one of the Tsarnaev brothers was not aimed at the West, but at Mr. Kadyrov, who is loathed by many Chechens and regarded as a vicious Kremlin stooge.

Mr. Kadyrov on Friday dismissed the Tsarnaev brothers and any ties between the Boston bombing and Chechnya. “The roots of this evil are to be found in America,” he said in a post on Instagram.

With all its longstanding crosscurrents, and partly because of its seeming remoteness and small scale, the Chechen conflict has long confounded American leaders and policy makers.

Boris Yeltsin, president of Russia immediately after the Soviet breakup, launched a war from 1994 to 1996 to re-establish control of the region. As Mr. Yeltsin’s prime minister, Mr. Putin ordered a second war in 1999, after a brief period of Chechen self-rule that was characterized by criminality and accusations of terrorism.

Mr. Putin waged a relentless campaign that included carpet bombing and the indiscriminate shelling of Grozny, with more ordnance than any European city had endured since World War II.

While the United States has shared intelligence on Chechen militants with the Russian government over the years, American officials have been reluctant to be too associated with Moscow’s Chechnya policies, which resulted in the destruction of Grozny, the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians and the indiscriminate imprisonment of many young men. Then, as open resistance declined, control was maintained by flagrantly rigged elections and collective punishment.

At one point during President George W. Bush’s administration, a debate broke out over a proposal by a National Security Council official to effectively partner with the Russians in fighting Chechen rebels. Other officials from the State Department and Pentagon vociferously opposed it, arguing that the United States should not ally itself with the Kremlin’s tactics.

By then what had started as a separatist revolt had partially assumed a jihadi cast. The Chechen cause had been adopted by the likes of Osama bin Laden and other foreign radicals, who tried to insinuate themselves into the struggle; several Chechen rebel leaders embraced Islam as a rallying cry.

Bin Laden’s top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, had traveled to Russia in 1996 to explore the possibility of relocating operations to Chechnya and was arrested on a visa violation, only to be released several months later. Mohammed Atta, a future Sept. 11 hijacker, and other members of a Qaeda cell initially wanted to join the jihad in Chechnya but were told it was too hard to get in and were advised to go to Afghanistan instead.

With the defection of some rebels like Mr. Kadyrov and his father, Moscow eventually re-established control over most of Chechnya. Much of Grozny was rebuilt.

But the separatist insurgency has never been extinguished. Whether the Boston bombing was tied to it is still unclear, but a generation of young Chechen men have never known a peaceful homeland, coming of age as young Muslims with few prospects at home in the Caucasus, and difficulties finding a place abroad.

Peter Baker reported from Washington, and C.J. Chivers from the United States.

History, Military News, War on Terror

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April 20, 2013

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The Functions of the National Archives and the Library of Congress

Since many public schools no longer teach Civics, this should be helpful to United States citizens and resident wishing to be better informed about how our government is supposed to work for us.

What’s the Difference Between the National Archives and the Library of Congress?
April 18, 2013 by Stephen Wesson
Today’s post was co-written by Stephanie Greenhut at the National Archives and Stephen Wesson at the Library of Congress. It is also posted on the Education Updates blog from the National Archives.

In 10 words or less, it’s what we’ve got and how we got it.

But we’ll go on. Because we get asked this question a lot. Both of us do. And because both the National Archives and the Library of Congress provide excellent resources for teaching history, civics and government, the humanities, and more!

The “original Rough draught” of the Declaration of
Independence. From the Library of Congress.
Let’s start with what we have in common: Making historical documents available to the public. The Library of Congress and the National Archives exist to preserve pieces of history and culture. As part of its mission to serve the U.S. Congress and the American people, a top priority of the Library is to “acquire, organize, preserve, secure and sustain for the present and future use of Congress and the nation a comprehensive record of American history.” The mission of the National Archives is to safeguard and preserve “the records of our Government, ensuring that the people can discover, use, and learn from this documentary heritage.” So we both store and protect documents, photographs, posters, moving images, audio, and more. And what’s really great is that we both make these accessible to the public. So you, your students, or anyone else can study what we have to understand the past.

But let’s get back to that key difference. What we have in our collections and holdings differs because of how it arrived through our doors. The National Archives, established in 1934, is the nation’s record keeper. By law, “permanently valuable” records of the federal government must come to the National Archives for safekeeping. So any record—be it a handwritten document, map, film reel, or email—created in the course of doing federal business, that falls into a category predetermined to be kept and preserved, is transferred to the National Archives when the agency or department that created it doesn’t need to refer to it any longer. Keeping only 1-3% of records the government produces still amounts to over ten billion records!

This print of the Declaration of Independence comes from an
1823 engraving and is the most frequently reproduced version of
the document. From the National Archives.
Meanwhile, the Library of Congress, established in 1800, is the world’s largest collection of knowledge and creativity, with treasures in 460 different languages that range from the Bay Psalm Book and European explorers’ maps to Thomas Edison’s films and the rough drafts of Langston Hughes. The Library takes in more than 10,000 objects a day, and they arrive in its in-box via a number of means. As the nation’s copyright repository, the Library receives two copies of every item registered for U.S. copyright. It also operates offices around the world to bring in and distribute materials from other countries. And many of the Library’s landmark objects and collections—such as the first map with the word “America,” and the papers of Abraham Lincoln—have been donated by individuals or groups, or purchased using donated funds. The Library is part of the legislative branch of our government, and the Archives is an independent federal agency within the executive branch.

Despite (and because of!) our differences, the Library and the National Archives are both great places to locate free primary sources in a wide variety of media for your classroom. Primary sources have a unique power to engage students, build their critical thinking skills, and help them create new understanding. You can find federal records like the Declaration of Independence, Voting Record of the Constitutional Convention, the Homestead Act, a letter from a soldier to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt asking her to be his son’s godmother, or the Pentagon Papers online from the National Archives. And at the Library of Congress website you can find Thomas Jefferson’s rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, powerful photos from the Dust Bowl, and oral histories from survivors of slavery.

Both institutions make it easy to find the primary sources you need. The search engine at loc.gov and the online catalog at archives.gov let you search millions of online primary sources and narrow your search to find just the object you and your students need.

The education staffs at the National Archives and the Library both create education materials and teacher resources to help teachers unlock the potential of primary sources. The Teachers page on the Library of Congress website provides lesson plans and primary source sets, all searchable by content and Common Core State Standards, as well as online professional development and tools to help your students start analyzing primary sources right away.

The Teachers Resources page on the National Archives website includes information about visits and professional development, as well as a link to DocsTeach.org, the online tool for teaching with documents from the National Archives. On DocsTeach, you can locate primary sources, as well as find and create online learning activities using seven interactive tools in combination with documents, images, maps, charts, audio and video.

Do you already use primary sources and teaching resources from the Library of Congress or the National Archives? We hope the answer is both!

Economic Systems, Museums, Social Media, Thinking and Intelligence, US Government

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April 19, 2013

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Future of the Automobile

Clean, safe and it drives itself
Cars have already changed the way we live. They are likely to do so again
Apr 20th 2013 |From the print edition

SOME inventions, like some species, seem to make periodic leaps in progress. The car is one of them. Twenty-five years elapsed between Karl Benz beginning small-scale production of his original Motorwagen and the breakthrough, by Henry Ford and his engineers in 1913, that turned the car into the ubiquitous, mass-market item that has defined the modern urban landscape. By putting production of the Model T on moving assembly lines set into the floor of his factory in Detroit, Ford drastically cut the time needed to build it, and hence its cost. Thus began a revolution in personal mobility. Almost a billion cars now roll along the world’s highways.

Today the car seems poised for another burst of evolution. One way in which it is changing relates to its emissions. As emerging markets grow richer, legions of new consumers are clamouring for their first set of wheels. For the whole world to catch up with American levels of car ownership, the global fleet would have to quadruple. Even a fraction of that growth would present fearsome challenges, from congestion and the price of fuel to pollution and global warming.
In this section
Clean, safe and it drives itself
Britain’s great divide
Speed isn’t everything
Maduro’s lousy start
Coming, ready or not
Reprints

Yet, as our special report this week argues, stricter regulations and smarter technology are making cars cleaner, more fuel-efficient and safer than ever before. China, its cities choked in smog, is following Europe in imposing curbs on emissions of noxious nitrogen oxides and fine soot particles. Regulators in most big car markets are demanding deep cuts in the carbon dioxide emitted from car exhausts. And carmakers are being remarkably inventive in finding ways to comply.

Granted, battery-powered cars have disappointed. They remain expensive, lack range and are sometimes dirtier than they look—for example, if they run on electricity from coal-fired power stations. But car companies are investing heavily in other clean technologies. Future motorists will have a widening choice of super-efficient petrol and diesel cars, hybrids (which switch between batteries and an internal-combustion engine) and models that run on natural gas or hydrogen. As for the purely electric car, its time will doubtless come.

Towards the driverless, near-crashless car

Meanwhile, a variety of “driver assistance” technologies are appearing on new cars, which will not only take a lot of the stress out of driving in traffic but also prevent many accidents. More and more new cars can reverse-park, read traffic signs, maintain a safe distance in steady traffic and brake automatically to avoid crashes. Some carmakers are promising technology that detects pedestrians and cyclists, again overruling the driver and stopping the vehicle before it hits them. A number of firms, including Google, are busy trying to take driver assistance to its logical conclusion by creating cars that drive themselves to a chosen destination without a human at the controls. This is where it gets exciting.

Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, predicts that driverless cars will be ready for sale to customers within five years. That may be optimistic, but the prototypes that Google already uses to ferry its staff (and a recent visitor from The Economist) along Californian freeways are impressive. Google is seeking to offer the world a driverless car built from scratch, but it is more likely to evolve, and be accepted by drivers, in stages.

As sensors and assisted-driving software demonstrate their ability to cut accidents, regulators will move to make them compulsory for all new cars. Insurers are already pressing motorists to accept black boxes that measure how carefully they drive: these will provide a mass of data which is likely to show that putting the car on autopilot is often safer than driving it. Computers never drive drunk or while texting.

If and when cars go completely driverless—for those who want this—the benefits will be enormous. Google gave a taste by putting a blind man in a prototype and filming him being driven off to buy takeaway tacos. Huge numbers of elderly and disabled people could regain their personal mobility. The young will not have to pay crippling motor insurance, because their reckless hands and feet will no longer touch the wheel or the accelerator. The colossal toll of deaths and injuries from road accidents—1.2m killed a year worldwide, and 2m hospital visits a year in America alone—should tumble down, along with the costs to health systems and insurers.

Driverless cars should also ease congestion and save fuel. Computers brake faster than humans. And they can sense when cars ahead of them are braking. So driverless cars will be able to drive much closer to each other than humans safely can. On motorways they could form fuel-efficient “road trains”, gliding along in the slipstream of the vehicle in front. People who commute by car will gain hours each day to work, rest or read a newspaper.

Roadblocks ahead

Some carmakers think this vision of the future is (as Henry Ford once said of history) bunk. People will be too terrified to hurtle down the motorway in a vehicle they do not control: computers crash, don’t they? Carmakers whose self-driving technology is implicated in accidents might face ruinously expensive lawsuits, and be put off continuing to develop it.

Yet many people already travel, unwittingly, on planes and trains that no longer need human drivers. As with those technologies, the shift towards driverless cars is taking place gradually. The cars’ software will learn the tricks that humans use to avoid hazards: for example, braking when a ball bounces into the road, because a child may be chasing it. Google’s self-driving cars have already clocked up over 700,000km, more than many humans ever drive; and everything they learn will become available to every other car using the software. As for the liability issue, the law should be changed to make sure that when cases arise, the courts take into account the overall safety benefits of self-driving technology.

If the notion that the driverless car is round the corner sounds far-fetched, remember that TV and heavier-than-air flying machines once did, too. One day people may wonder why earlier generations ever entrusted machines as dangerous as cars to operators as fallible as humans.

From the print edition: Leaders

computer technology, Finance and Economics, Innovation, Science and Technology

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April 18, 2013

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Another Benefit from Google Search

The Story of How a Book Stolen by the Nazis Made Its Way Back Home
The 21st century hasn’t just collapsed geographical distances, but distances of time as well, making history easier than ever to access.
Rebecca J. Rosen
Apr 17 2013, 1:23 PM ET

The book itself is nothing so special — just a periodical from a German Alpine club — but when Peter Schweitzer, a rabbi living in New York, saw it listed among the results of a Google search last spring, it took his breath away.

The book once belonged to Schweitzer’s great-grandfather, Franz Fuerstenheim, a Berlin Jew who had fled his home as the Nazis rose to power. Schweitzer had stumbled into a project of the Central and Regional Library of Berlin to reunite possibly as many as 250,000 Nazi-seized books with their owners or descendents, (or, in most cases, the descendants of those owners). Bloomberg News’s Catherine Hickley recently profiled this project as part of a broader story looking at how libraries are dealing with the Nazi-looted books in their collections. At the Central and Regional Library of Berlin, perhaps a fifth have identifying name plates that may make reunification possible, but for the remaining majority, there’s no real chance of locating the former owners.

But Schweitzer was one of the lucky ones. His great-grandparents had put their nameplate in the book (pictured above), and the library had catalogued it under their names. Schweitzer’s simple Google search pulled it up.

“I didn’t know the database existed! I didn’t have a clue,” Schweitzer told me. “I must have just punched in the name and, the next thing I knew …”

Once he had made the connection, Schweitzer had to prove that he was in fact a descendant of the Fuerstenheims. His father, who is still alive, recognized the nameplate. “One thing led to another and they said okay, we’re going to give you the book,” he told me. “I said great! I’m coming to Germany and I would like to be able to pick it up. And they said good.”

So Schweitzer and his son, Oren, who was 10 at the time, went to Berlin last summer and made their way over to the library.

“We had to walk through one door after another door after another door to get to where we were going,” Schweitzer describes. The library was “an interesting maze of rooms,” inside which librarians sat smoking (“which shocked me”) and they offered Schweitzer and his son lemonade and cookies. “That was very generous of them, I thought, but from my experience with rare book rooms, you don’t normally have food anywhere near the books.” But all seemed to go off without a hitch, and the book was returned, a passing from German back to Jew, seven decades after its seizure.

We often talk about the 21st century and the advanced communications technologies it has brought in the context of the phenomenon of globalization — the collapsing of distances in a way that makes the whole world seem smaller. What we are less liable to realize is that this process is at work not just with geographical distance but with time, too. The Central and Regional Library of Berlin’s lost-book database, like this project to build a database of slave burial sites or like the deep historical collections put online by libraries everywhere, makes the past somehow closer, easier to access, even though we may feel viscerally that the pace of technological change has made those times feel further away.

Interestingly, Schweitzer says that seeing the names of his great-grandparents in the results was more powerful, in a sense, than actually holding the book. “The book is an object which didn’t have personal significance to me. I can’t read it; I can’t understand it.” Perhaps had his family been killed in the Holocaust (Franz escaped eventually to New York, and Clara had died before the Nazis rose to power), the object itself would have much more meaning, sort of a synecdoche for the person lost, but for Schweitzer the crime the book represented was one of property, not life. The return of the book could repair that original wrong in a small but very concrete way.

“To find his name there, on this list of loss — it is a list of absence and recovery — knowing that probably significant numbers of the names on this list were killed, and knowing that they had survived … there was something poignant about it in a different way.”

“I guess,” he concluded, “I could say that every little piece of finding something about [my great-grandparents] is restorative.”

computer technology, Family Events, History, Memoirs, Stories

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April 18, 2013

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1979 Was a Pivotal Year

Strange Rebels: 19Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century. By Christian Caryl. Basic; 400 pages; $28.99 and £18.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

HISTORIANS have a professional fondness for “turning-points”: years that act as hinges of history rather than numbers in a sequence. Some of these hinges turn out to be anything but: 1917 proved to be a bloody dead end and 1848 proved to be, in A.J.P. Taylor’s phrase, “a turning-point in history when history failed to turn”. But others, such as 1789 (when France’s ancien régime collapsed) and 1517 (when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses on the door), resound down the ages.

Later this month Christian Caryl, a veteran foreign correspondent now based in Washington, will publish a timely new book, “Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century”. In it he argues that 1979 belongs to the select club of real turning-points: years in which one era ended and another was born. This was a year in which a series of momentous figures appeared on the world stage. Margaret Thatcher won the general election and became Britain’s first woman prime minister, staying in power for 11 years. Deng Xiaoping began to liberalise the Chinese economy. Ayatollah Khomeini established an Islamic republic. Karol Wojtyla travelled to Poland as the first Slavic pope. And in Afghanistan the mujahideen rose up against Soviet rule with the tacit support of the United States.

It was also a year in which the twin forces of the market and religion, suppressed and discounted for decades, returned with a vengeance. Mrs Thatcher came to power determined to dismantle Britain’s nationalised industries, discipline its over-mighty trade unions and restore its quiescent faith in entrepreneurship and self-reliance. Deng embarked on the world’s biggest-ever poverty-reduction programme, ending the country’s disastrous experiment with collective farming and establishing special economic zones where both foreign and domestic companies could flourish away from the direct supervision of the state. In a vivid example of just how backward China was, Mr Caryl describes how one factory in Shenzhen celebrated its new-found freedoms by killing and eating a dog.

Even more surprising than the revival of the market was the revival of religion. The Islamic revolution brought millions of people onto the street—and rapidly turned one of the Middle East’s most secular countries into one of its most orthodox (one wag joked that before Khomeini Iranians drank in public and prayed in private but after Khomeini they prayed in public and drank in private). Pope John Paul II demonstrated that religion was even more popular in the atheist East—or at least in Poland—than in the capitalist West. Mrs Thatcher spoke for the entire group of “strange rebels” when, in response to the accusation that she was a reactionary, replied, “Well, there’s a lot to react against!” These twin revolutions sometimes cancelled each other out. Khomeini fused religious fundamentalism with third-world leftism: the Iranian state extended its grip over the private sector and strangled the country’s economy. Deng fused pro-market reforms with the rule of the atheistic Communist Party. But they often proved to be mutually reinforcing. The revival of religion in both Poland and Afghanistan hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The reassertion of market liberalism in both Britain and China contributed to a general sense that the old order was folding up. Mr Caryl tells this story with great skill. He moves effortlessly from one scene to another in this tumultuous year—from Mrs Thatcher’s election victory to Khomeini’s relentless extension of his power, from John Paul’s visit to his homeland to Deng’s emergence as the most powerful politician in China after the Communist Party’s third plenum. He fills in both the back story and the fore story: how China came to be in the mess that it was in after the Cultural Revolution, for example, and how Deng’s reforms relentlessly turned China into the economic powerhouse of today.

Mr Caryl also sprinkles his fast-paced narrative with plenty of striking details. For example, at a state dinner to mark Deng’s first visit to the United States the grizzled Chinese statesman was placed at the same table as Shirley Maclaine. The actress gushed that she had visited China during the Cultural Revolution and that everything had been wonderful. She was particularly struck by a professor who told her how grateful he was that the party had decided to send him and his fellow academics to the countryside. Deng looked at her scornfully and said that “he was lying”. Professors should be teaching university classes not planting vegetables.

The forces unleashed by this remarkable year continue to shape the world. China is well on its way to becoming the world’s biggest economy. For all the damage wrought by the financial crisis the Thatcher-inspired privatisations, which spread from Britain to the rest of the world, are unlikely to be reversed. On the negative side, Iran remains an Islamic republic and the mujahideen continue to wreak havoc in Afghanistan—this time harassing not a decaying Soviet empire but an overextended American one. Anyone who wants to understand how this new world came into being needs to read Mr Caryl’s excellent book. From the print edition:

Book Reviews, Books of note, History

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April 17, 2013

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Massachusetts National Guard Does its State Proud

These Soldiers Did the Boston Marathon Wearing 40-Pound Packs. Then They Helped Save Lives.

When the bombs went off, the Tough Ruck 2013 crew sprang into action. —By Tasneem Raja |

Terror Attacks on Sporting Events, Especially Marathons, Are Surprisingly Rare . At 5:20 a.m. on Monday, four hours before the Boston Marathon’s elite runners took off, a group of 15 active-duty soldiers from the Massachusetts National Guard gathered at the starting line in Hopkinson. Each soldier was in full combat uniform and carried a “ruck,” a military backpack weighing about 40 pounds. The rucks were filled with Camelbacks of water, extra uniforms, Gatorade, changes of socks—and first-aid and trauma kits. It was all just supposed to be symbolic. “Forced marches” or “humps” are a regular part of military training, brisk walking over tough terrain while carrying gear that could help a soldier survive if stranded alone.

These soldiers, participating in “Tough Ruck 2013,” were doing the 26 miles of the Boston Marathon to honor comrades killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, or lost to suicide and PTSD-related accidents after coming home. “We just absolutely annihilated the fence and pulled it back so we could see the victims underneath.” It took about eight hours for all of the soldiers to cross the finish line, some cruising nearly at a 13-minute mile, others coming in at a little slower pace. They were gathered near the medical tent behind the finish line, waiting for the elite runners to come in. That was the contingency plan in case anything went wrong—meet by the medical tent.

“You never think you’re gonna need it, but you always have to have a contingency plan,” says Lieutenant Stephen Fiola of the 1060th Transportation Company, who worked with the Military Friends Foundation to organize the march. Two soldiers stationed in Afghanistan also participated in the ruck from afar, according to Fiola, marching in circles around their base for 26 miles in remembrance of fallen comrades. A Tough Ruck soldier marching the marathon course Military Friends Foundation One soldier in the Boston group walked the marathon in honor of Lance Cpl. Alexander Arredondo, who was 20 years old when he died in action in Iraq in 2004. Arredondo’s father, Carlos, was waiting at the finish line to greet the ruckers, wearing a cowboy hat and a Tough Ruck T-shirt, and carrying pictures of his two deceased sons, the second of whom succumbed to depression and suicide after his brother was killed. Fiola was also there, handing Arredondo a bunch of small American flags to pass out to the crowd of spectators in the bleachers.

“Everyone was so happy,” says Fiola. “People were cheering, there was music playing, it was almost a surreal experience. A beautiful day.” When the explosion went off, Fiola and his group immediately went into tactical mode. “I did a count and told the younger soldiers to stay put,” Fiola says. “Myself and two other soldiers, my top two guys in my normal unit, crossed the street about 100 yards to the metal scaffoldings holding up the row of flags. We just absolutely annihilated the fence and pulled it back so we could see the victims underneath. The doctors and nurses from the medical tent were on the scene in under a minute. We were pulling burning debris off of people so that the medical personnel could get to them and begin triage.”

“There was a guy behind me covered in his own blood, and I started to smell some smoke. I turn around to look and he’s actually on fire I saw the smoke coming from his pocket so I reached in and pulled it out. It was his handkerchief, on fire.”.” Once the victims were transported away for further medical care, Fiola and the others stood guard around the blast area. “We switched to keeping the scene safe, quarantining the area and preventing people from entering.   Fiola saw Carlos Arredondo in the distance, assisting more victims.

One of Monday’s most harrowing images shows Arredondo, with his cowboy hat and long dark hair, and two others frantically wheeling a young man who appeared to have lost parts of both his legs. In a video shot by a bystander moments later, Arredondo trembles visibly and grips one of the American flags Fiola had handed to him, now drenched in blood, and explains what he saw and did after the explosions. The right sleeve of his Tough Ruck T-shirt is crimson up to the elbow. On Tuesday, Fiola said his priority is checking in on the members of Tough Ruck 2013, asking how they’re doing in the aftermath of the tragedy and getting them connected with the Massachusetts National Guard’s support system of mental-health providers, chaplains, and fellow soldiers. He’s encouraging them to talk about what happened with a focus on the help they were able to provide during the chaos. “We had some sort of an influence, at least in helping the nurses get to the wounded and helping calm people down,” he says. “It’s one of those things that makes you go home and kiss everyone in your family.”

Military News, Sport, Thinking and Intelligence, War on Terror

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April 16, 2013

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An Horrific Boston Marathon

Boston Explosion Coverage:

Networks Go Wall-To-Wall With Marathon Horror; Reporter Calls It ‘Worst Thing I Ever Saw’ The Huffington Post | By Jack Mirkinson and Rebecca Shapiro Posted: 04/15/2013 3:24 pm EDT |  Every broadcast and cable network raced to cover the horrific explosions at the Boston Marathon on Monday. News of the blasts first circulated on Twitter and came just as journalists had their eyes trained on the announcement of the Pulitzer Prizes. That Pulitzer announcement quickly fell off the radar as the scope of the devastation in Boston became clear.

Fox News was first to turn to the news, with Shepard Smith anchoring coverage, with CNN quickly following. In the next five minutes, MSNBC also switched to breaking coverage. Fox News was also the first to post chilling video from the scene. A man could be heard offscreen saying, “Oh my god, they’re dead.” The network was later the first to say that there had been fatalities. MSNBC kept its coverage rolling through the 4:00 p.m. hour, replacing Martin Bashir’s show with breaking news coverage anchored by Tamron Hall. CNN was the first to dub the explosions a “terror attack,” which it did just before 6 PM. All three major broadcast networks also cut into their regular programming. NBC and CBS turned to their evening news anchors, Brian Williams and Scott Pelley. ABC coverage was led by George Stephanopoulos and Diane Sawyer.

Networks then announced their plans for evening and morning news coverage. CNN tweeted that Anderson Cooper, Chris Cuomo and Poppy Harlow would report live from Boston. Diane Sawyer was set to anchor a special report for ABC News from New York. The 30-minute program was expanded to a special one-hour edition. Terry Moran was anchoring “Nightline” from Boston. The New York Times’ Brian Stelter tweeted that CBS’ Scott Pelley was to host an extended one-hour newscast. Norah O’Donnell will co-host “CBS This Morning” from Boston on Tuesday. NBC said it would air a special hour at 10:00 p.m. “Today” co-host Matt Lauer tweeted that he would be hosting the morning show from Boston on Tuesday. He added that Fox News’ Smith would continue anchoring the network’s breaking news coverage, skipping the 5:00 p.m. show “The Five.” Bill O’Reilly’s show, which is usually taped, was set to air live at 8:00 p.m. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was headed to Boston.

The news played out in the way that all breaking events now do: first on Twitter, then on television, with a dizzying flurry of eyewitness videos, tweets, Vines and photos complementing the coverage. According to CNN, more than 26,000 people ran this year’s Boston Marathon. The race also fell on Patriot’s Day, a state holiday in Massachusetts. The two blasts went off by the Boston Marathon finish line at Copley Square just before 3:00 p.m. David Abel, a reporter for the Boston Globe, was 10 feet away from the explosions. He tweeted about the experience: “Fine. Reporting. I was 10 feet from explosion. Shaken up. But not a scratch. Worst thing I ever saw.”

Holiday Celebrations, Military News, Sporting Events, War on Terror

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April 15, 2013

2 Comments

Remembering America’s Prima Ballerina

American prima ballerina Maria Tallchief dies at 88 BY Hedy Weiss Dance Critic/hweiss@suntimes.com

At a time when most ballerinas arrived onstage bearing a Russian name, whether genuine or assumed, Maria Tallchief, widely considered the first major American prima ballerina, insisted on holding fast to her roots. Born Elizabeth Maria Tallchief in Fairfax, Oklahoma in 1925, her mother was Scots-Irish, but her father, Alexander Tallchief, was a chief in the Osage Nation, and her great-grandfather, Peter Bigheart, was crucial in negotiating oil revenues for the Osage tribe.

Tallchief, a leading figure in 20th century dance, whose career spanned the years 1942-1965, and who at one time was both wife and muse to choreographer George Balanchine, died of pancreatic cancer at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago on April 11. She was 88. “What an extraordinary career Maria had,” said Ashley Wheater, artistic director of the Joffrey Ballet, who met her several times in Chicago. “She really paved the way for dancers who were not in the traditional mold of ballet. And reaching such a high rank, she was crucial in breaking the stigma. She also was the spark behind much of the amazing work created by Balanchine. “When you watch Tallchief on video, you see that aside from the technical polish there is a burning passion she brought to her dancing. In her interpretation of Balanchine’s ‘Firebird,’ she was consumed both inside and out. She was not just a great dancer, but a real artist — a true interpreter who brought her personality to bear on the dancing.

In regard to the Joffrey, she told me she hoped we would be able to bring the strongest dance education here, and also to do more Balanchine, which we plan to do.” Although a ballet career was a challenge for a Native-American girl of her day, the Tallchief family moved to Beverly Hills, California, in 1933, and Maria, who also was a gifted pianist, began studying ballet there. At the age of 12 she became a pupil of Bronislava Nijinska, the dancer, choreographer and sister of the fabled Vaslav Nijinsky.

By 17, Tallchief was in New York auditioning. She joined the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and performed with the company from 1942-47, quickly rising to featured soloist. Balanchine joined the Ballet Russe in 1944, and he and Tallchief married two years later. In 1947 she accompanied her husband to the Paris Opera where she appeared in his “Serenade,” “Apollon musagete” and “Baiser de la Fee.” Then, back in New York, Balanchine began creating what would become the New York City Ballet, and Tallchief became his leading ballerina. Tallchief created the leading roles in such major Balanchine ballets as “Symphonie Concertante,” “Orpheus,” “Firebird” (which became her signature role), “Scotch Symphony,” “Allegro Brilliante” and many others. She also starred in his versions of “Swan Lake” and “Nutcracker.”

By 1951 Balanchine and Tallchief had annulled their marriage, but they stayed together as dancer and choreographer. In 1954, while on tour with Ballet Russe, Tallchief reportedly made $2,000 per week and was the highest-paid prima ballerina of that time. She subsequently met Chicago builder Henry “Buzz” Paschen, who she married in 1956. He died in 2004. Their daughter, Elise Maria Paschen, is an acclaimed poet. Tallchief, who retired from dancing in 1965, served as director of the Chicago Lyric Opera Ballet from 1973 to 1979. In 1981, with her sister Marjorie, who also was a successful dancer, she founded the Chicago City Ballet and was its artistic director until 1987. From 1990-2013 she was honorary artistic advisor to Von Heidecke’s Chicago Festival Ballet. “My mother was a ballet legend, who was proud of her Osage heritage,” said Elise Paschen. “Her dynamic presence lit up the room. I will miss her passion, commitment to her art and devotion to her family. She raised the bar high and strove for excellence in everything she did.”

In addition to her daughter, Tallchief is survived by her son-in-law Stuart Brainerd and two grandchildren, Stephen and Alexandra. Ken von Heidecke, founder of the Chicago Festival Ballet, said: “Maria Tallchief Paschen was not only a prima ballerina assoluta. She also was a great teacher. She possessed an uncanny ability to articulate the art form of dance on multiple planes: to explain how the laws of physics govern all we do; to teach the geometry and line of the essence of classicism in dance, and to communicate the spiritual essence that creates the illusion of weightlessness and the effect of the supernatural. I, and so many others, owe our careers in dance to her meticulous training.” There will be a private family burial. Details about a public memorial service will be announced at a future date.

Art, History, Obituaries

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April 15, 2013

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