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Chicago Tribune
26-05-2025
- Politics
- Chicago Tribune
Today in History: Production of Model T ended
Today is Monday, May 26, the 146th day of 2025. There are 219 days left in the year. This is Memorial Day. Today in history: On May 26, 1927, the Ford Model T officially ended production as Henry Ford and his son Edsel drove the 15 millionth Model T off the Ford assembly line in Highland Park, Michigan. Also on this date: In 1864, President Abraham Lincoln signed a measure creating the Montana Territory. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Immigration Act of 1924, which barred immigration from Asia and restricted the total number of immigrants from other parts of the world to 165,000 annually. In 1938, the House Un-American Activities Committee was established by Congress. In 1940, Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of more than 338,000 Allied troops from Dunkirk, France, began during World War II. In 1954, an explosion occurred aboard the aircraft carrier USS Bennington off Rhode Island, killing 103 sailors. In 1967, the Beatles album 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' was released. In 1972, President Richard M. Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty in Moscow following the SALT I negotiations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. (The U.S. withdrew from the treaty under President George W. Bush in 2002.) In 1981, 14 people were killed when a Marine jet crashed onto the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz off Florida. In 2009, California's Supreme Court upheld the state's Proposition 8 same-sex marriage ban but said the 18,000 same-sex weddings that had taken place before the prohibition passed were still valid. (Same-sex marriage became legal nationwide in June 2015.) 2009, President Barack Obama nominated federal appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2011, Ratko Mladić, the brutal Bosnian Serb general suspected of leading the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, was arrested after a 16-year manhunt. (Extradited to face trial in The Hague, Netherlands, Mladić was convicted in 2017 on genocide and war crimes charges and is serving a life sentence.) Today's Birthdays: Sportscaster Brent Musburger is 86. Singer-songwriter Stevie Nicks is 77. Actor Pam Grier is 76. Country singer Hank Williams Jr. is 76. Celebrity chef Masaharu Morimoto is 70. Actor Genie Francis is 63. Comedian Bobcat Goldthwait is 63. Musician Lenny Kravitz is 61. Actor Helena Bonham Carter is 59. Actor Joseph Fiennes is 55. Actor-producer-writer Matt Stone is 54. Singer-songwriter Lauryn Hill is 50. Singer Jaheim is 47.
Washington Post
29-04-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
No, thank you. I don't want to appear on one of Trump's ‘lists.'
It's rarely comforting to appear on a government 'list,' even (or perhaps especially) when compiled in the name of public safety. It was alarming in the 1940s, when the U.S. government collected the names of Japanese Americans for internment. Likewise in the 1950s, when the House Un-American Activities Committee catalogued communists. And it's just as troubling now, as the Trump administration assembles registries of Jewish academics and Americans with developmental disabilities. Yes, these are real things that happened this past week, the latest examples of the White House's abuse of confidential data. Last week, faculty and staff at Barnard College received unsolicited texts asking them whether they were Jewish. Employees were stunned by the messages, which many initially dismissed as spam. Turns out the messages came from the Trump administration. Barnard, which is affiliated with Columbia University, had agreed to share faculty members' private contact info to aid in President Donald Trump's pseudo-crusade against antisemitism. Ah, yes, a far-right president asking Jews to register as Jewish, in the name of protecting the Jews, after he has repeatedly accused Jews of being 'disloyal.' What could go wrong? The same day, National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya announced a 'disease registry' of people with autism, to be compiled from confidential private and government health records, apparently without its subjects' awareness or consent. This is part of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s vendetta against vaccines, which he has said cause autism despite abundant research concluding otherwise. This, too, is disturbing given authoritarian governments' history of compiling lists of citizens branded mentally or physically deficient. If that historical analogue seems excessive, note that Bhattacharya's announcement came just a week after Kennedy delivered inflammatory remarks lamenting that kids with autism will never lead productive lives. They 'will never pay taxes, they'll never hold a job,' he said, adding they'll never play baseball or go on a date, either. This all happened during Autism Acceptance Month, established to counter exactly these kinds of stigmatizing stereotypes. Kennedy's comments and the subsequent 'registry' set off a wave of fear in the autism advocacy community and earned condemnation from scientists. Obviously, advocates want more research and support for those with autism. They have been asking for more help at least since 1965 (when what is now called the Autism Society of America was founded in my grandparents' living room). But few in this community trust political appointees hostile to scientific research — or a president who has publicly mocked people with disabilities — to use an autism 'registry' responsibly. (An unnamed HHS official later walked back Bhattacharya's comments, saying the department was not creating a 'registry,' per se, just a 'real-world data platform' that 'will link existing datasets to support research into causes of autism and insights into improved treatment strategies.' Okay.) These are hardly the administration's only abuses of federal data. It has been deleting reams of statistical records, including demographic data on transgender Americans. It has also been exploiting other private administrative records for political purposes. For example, the Internal Revenue Service — in an effort to persuade people to pay their taxes — spent decades assuring people that their records are confidential, regardless of immigration status. The agency is in fact legally prohibited from sharing tax records, even with other government agencies, except under very limited circumstances specified by Congress. Lawmakers set these limits in response to Richard M. Nixon's abuse of private tax data to target personal enemies. Trump torched these precedents and promises. After a series of top IRS officials resigned, the agency has now agreed to turn over confidential records to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement locate and deport some 7 million undocumented immigrants. The move, which also has troubling historical echoes, is being challenged in court. But, in the meantime, tax collections will likely fall. Undocumented immigrant workers had been paying an estimated $66 billion in federal taxes annually, but they now have even more reason to stay off the books. This and other DOGE infiltrations of confidential records are likely to discourage public cooperation on other sensitive government data collection efforts. Think research on mental health issues or public safety assessments on domestic violence. But that might be a feature, not a bug, for this administration. Chilling federal survey participation and degrading data quality were arguably deliberate objectives in Trump's first term, when he tried to cram a question about citizenship into the 2020 Census. The question was expected to depress response rates and help Republicans game the congressional redistricting process. Courts ultimately blocked Trump's plans. That's what it will take to stop ongoing White House abuses, too: not scrapping critical government records, but championing the rule of law. Ultimately, the government must be able to collect and integrate high-quality data — to administer social programs efficiently, help the economy function and understand the reality we live in so voters can hold public officials accountable. None of this is possible if Americans fear ending up on some vindictive commissar's 'list.'
The Guardian
30-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Richard Chamberlain obituary
Despite becoming a lauded stage and film actor, Richard Chamberlain, who has died aged 90, carried the label of soap-opera star around his neck for most of his career of more than five decades. It began with his huge success in the hospital television series Dr Kildare (1961-66), in which Chamberlain's clean-cut good looks were the prime attraction, bringing him thousands of fan letters a week. Chamberlain's other immensely successful television roles came in three mini-series, Centennial (1978-79), Shogun (1980) and The Thorn Birds (1983). His perfectly chiselled features, which made him ideal for romantic leads in soap operas, prevented many producers from visualising him in more demanding roles. However, through talent and determination he starred in numerous films and on the stage in parallel to his television work. Born in Los Angeles, he had a cool relationship with his alcoholic father, Charles, a salesman, but a warm one with his mother, Elsa (nee Von Benzon). At Beverly Hills high school, he excelled in athletics, and his good grades enabled him to study art history and painting at Pomona College, southern California, where he was able to satisfy his dream of becoming an actor in plays by Shakespeare, Shaw and Arthur Miller. After graduating, Chamberlain served 16 months in Korea, where he was made company clerk of his infantry company, later promoted to the rank of sergeant. On his return to the US, Chamberlain studied acting with Jeff Corey, who became renowned as a teacher after being blacklisted in Hollywood by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Although Corey's sense-memory Stanislavskian method is not immediately apparent in Chamberlain's performances, the actor claimed to have learned how to tap into his own emotions and psyche. At the time, he was struggling with having to 'live a lie' about his sexuality. In 1959, Chamberlain, Leonard Nimoy and Vic Morrow were among the founders of the Company of Angels, a repertory theatre in Los Angeles. While playing there in La Ronde and The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, Chamberlain started to get parts in television series. His first feature films were The Secret of the Purple Reef (1960), a low-voltage, low-budget thriller shot in Puerto Rico, and A Thunder of Drums (1961), a western in which he was hardly noticeable as a young cavalry officer. Then came the role of Dr Kildare, for which Chamberlain beat 35 other candidates. In the first episode, the senior medic Dr Leonard Gillespie (Raymond Massey) tells Chamberlain, as the young, earnest, caring James Kildare, an intern at Blair general hospital: 'Our job is to keep people alive, not to tell them how to live.' Kildare ignores the advice, thus supplying the basis for most of the plots of the next 190 episodes across five seasons. In 1962, with his popularity at its height, he recorded a hit song, Three Stars Will Shine Tonight, based on the music of the show's hummable opening theme. It revealed that Chamberlain had a fine singing voice, which he used on a number of singles and an album, Richard Chamberlain Sings (1962), and much later as leads in stage musicals such as My Fair Lady (1993), The Sound of Music (1998), Scrooge (2004), The King and I (2006) and Monty Python's Spamalot (2009). When Dr Kildare ended, Chamberlain decided to prove that he was not just a pretty face, by appearing in summer stock productions of The Philadelphia Story and Private Lives (both 1966). He then worked for three years in Britain, on television, stage and film. He was excellent as Ralph Touchett in the BBC's six-part adaptation of Henry James's novel The Portrait of a Lady (1968).The role got him noticed by Peter Dews, the artistic director of Birmingham repertory theatre, who offered him the chance to play Hamlet in 1969. The play was a sell-out for its limited five and a half week run, and in the main, the British critics were positive, with the Times reflecting the consensus: 'Anyone who comes to this production prepared to scoff at the sight of a popular television actor, Richard Chamberlain, playing Hamlet, will be in for a deep disappointment.' The Daily Mail commented that 'the perturbed spirit of Dr Kildare may rest at last. In Mr Chamberlain we have no mean actor.' In films, he was a noble Octavius Caesar in Julius Caesar (1970), and a striking Lord Byron in Lady Caroline Lamb (1973), and he was able to express some of his own angst and sexual liberation as a gay Tchaikovsky in Ken Russell's The Music Lovers (1971). At this time, it was an open showbiz secret that Chamberlain was romantically involved with the US actor Wesley Eure. The rest of the films he made in the 1970s – The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974), in which he played Aramis; The Slipper and the Rose (1976), almost typecast as Prince Charming; and the disaster movies The Towering Inferno (1974) and The Swarm (1978) – were lucrative but hardly challenging. He was more stretched in Peter Weir's The Last Wave (1977), shot in Australia, where he was the initially smug lawyer defending a group of Indigenous Australians accused of murder. In the meantime, Chamberlain had made a triumphant Broadway debut in Tennessee Williams's The Night of the Iguana (1976-77) at Circle in the Square theatre. According to one critic, Chamberlain, as the defrocked priest now a tour guide, 'captures the self-lacerating torment of Reverend Shannon'. During the run, he started a relationship with Martin Rabbett, a production assistant on the play. They remained together until 2010, and later resumed their partnership. In the 80s, Chamberlain established himself again on television, earning the nickname 'king of the miniseries'. Shogun, based on James Clavell's novel, starred Chamberlain as Pilot-Major John Blackthorne, an Englishman trying to gain acceptance in early 17th-century Japan. Chamberlain, long-haired and black-bearded, held his own among a cast of superb Japanese actors that included the dynamic Toshiro Mifune. In The Thorn Birds, he was sexy Father Ralph de Bricassart, the Roman Catholic priest who carries on a tortured, illicit romance with Meggie Cleary, played by Rachel Ward, in the Australian outback. It was disliked by Colleen McCullough, the author of the original 1977 bestseller. She said: 'It was instant vomit! Ward couldn't act her way out of a paper bag and Chamberlain wandered about all wet and wide-eyed.' Nevertheless, the 10-hour, four-part, $23m show became one of the most watched TV series ever. Chamberlain continued to move between films, television and theatre, and his homes in Hawaii and Los Angeles, over the next decades. He was a guest star on the TV comedy series Will & Grace (2005), and his final film role came as an acting coach in Finding Julia (2019). In 2003, in his memoir, Shattered Love, he wrote about his dislike of himself for not being true to himself in order to protect his matinee idol image, but in coming out he 'finally made friends with life'. He is survived by Rabbett. George Richard Chamberlain, actor, born 31 March 1934; died 29 March 2025 Ronald Bergan died in 2020
Yahoo
29-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Deseret News archives: Rosenberg case in 1951 was part of Cold War fervor in America
A look back at local, national and world events through Deseret News archives. On March 29, 1951, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted in New York of conspiracy to commit espionage for the Soviet Union. Their trial was sensational and headline-grabbing. The pair was executed in June 1953. But were they guilty? Newspaper headlines in March 1951 centered on the Rosenberg trial and the Manhattan Project, as well as a New York City trial focused on mob boss Frank Costello, and the daily inquiries of Hollywood celebrities in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington, D.C. The Cold War was in full swing. The Rosenbergs and Morton Sobell were accused of being Soviet spies who passed along information to the Soviet Union and recruited Manhattan Project spies. Julius was a U.S. citizen and electrical engineer. His wife Ethel may have been privy to his exploits. Their trial remains controversial today. But court records made public in recent years through a judge's order cast doubt on the conventional narrative of a Cold War espionage case that captivated the country. It makes for great investigation. New documents showed that Ethel Rosenberg's brother, whose damning trial testimony against her and her husband helped secure the couple's conviction, had never implicated his sister in an earlier appearance before a grand jury. The brother, David Greenglass, offered the grand jury no evidence of his sister's direct involvement and said he never discussed such matters with his sister. In 1953, a photo of the Rosenbergs' two sons reading a newspaper the day before their parents were executed appeared in many publications. Since then, the two boys have tried to exonerate their mother. As young boys, Robert and Michael Meeropol visited the White House in 1953 in a failed bid to get President Dwight Eisenhower to prevent their parents' executions. They later appealed to President Barack Obama. Here are some articles from Deseret News archives about the case, the trial and the eventual execution of the pair: 'Testimony from Rosenberg brother released in famous spy case' 'Prosecution may have lied about Rosenberg' 'Sons of Ethel Rosenberg plead with Obama to exonerate mother' 'Rosenberg kin call on U.S. to clear parents of spying" 'To KGB, `Babylon' was S.F. and `Boar' was Churchill' 'Tour of D.C. spotlights famous spy hangouts' 'A brief look at the history of the Espionage Act'
Boston Globe
04-03-2025
- General
- Boston Globe
A New England singer made sublime music. Then she vanished.
Some of her farewell notes indicated that she was headed back to New York, to make another fresh start. But other missives were more ominous. To her mother, still living in Concord, New Hampshire, where she was raised, she wrote: 'Take care of yourself, and get all the enjoyment you can out of life.' Another letter was even darker: 'Human society fascinates me and awes me and fills me with grief and joy; I just can't find my place to plug into it. So let me go, please.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Her car was never found; neither was her body. At the time of her departure, Converse was in rough shape: unemployed, in poor health, depressed, and a chain-smoking alcoholic. Though she'd dedicated her life to an astonishing range of artistic and intellectual pursuits (including visual art, poetry, prose, opera, and scholarly investigations into conflict resolution, institutional racism, statistics, and history), her accomplishments were virtually invisible in her time. As a woman toiling in worlds dominated by men, creating work far ahead of its time, she struggled to make herself known. 'I have dozens of fans, all over the world,' she would quip. If only she'd known. Converse is now being embraced by generations of new fans who began discovering her music with the 2009 release of the album Advertisement Converse was a Yankee, by birth if not by temperament. Though her ancestral family tree is deeply rooted in old New England soil (relatives on both sides of her family arrived in Boston in the 1630s), Converse spent her life rebelling against the stifling traditionalism of her forebears, rejecting the patriarchy and forging wild, new paths for herself. The recipient of a scholarship to attend Mount Holyoke College, she dropped out after two years and moved to New York City, where she found work in 1945 with a humanitarian think tank. When the House Un-American Activities Committee trained its lens on the organization for having possible Communist ties, she lost her job there, moved to Greenwich Village, and began writing and performing her own songs at a time when Bob Dylan was still a kid in Minnesota listening to Hank Williams in his childhood bedroom. Recordings released after Connie Converse's disappearance. The Musick Group, Heroic Cities LLC Converse is also being celebrated today for the way she defiantly thumbed her nose at 1950s conventions. At a time when American women were expected to get married and have children, Converse sang songs about sexual liberation and the virtues of living alone. She ran with crowds that were bohemian, multiracial, and gay. In a diary entry responding to America's hard turn to the right in the McCarthy era, she wrote: 'If I ever cease to recall that my destiny is bound with a living cord to the destiny of the Jews, the Negroes, the anti-fascists, the expendables, I shall indeed be half dead.' Advertisement By day, Converse worked a survival job. At night, she performed her songs in private homes, passing a hat to support her musical ambitions, which also included composing an opera and a formal song cycle based on Greek mythology's Cassandra, about another woman out of step with her time. When Converse left New York in early 1961, just as Stekert's intentions were good, but that moniker has stuck to Converse in ways that confuse and limit her legacy. Since his rise to prominence in the 1960s, Dylan's work has been the yardstick against which all 'singer-songwriters' are measured. But Converse was more than just an early example of that too-vague term. It's true that some of her songs were predictive of the formula that Dylan would ride to fame and fortune (original songs that mined the influences of traditional folk, blues, country, and gospel influences, while using the 'I' perspective, in introspective, witty, and literary ways), and in the way that she sang them (in an unpolished, often vulnerable voice). But much of her music could also be said to reside in the worlds of classical song, show tunes, jazz, and pop — a range of stylistic influences that she managed to synthesize into her own unique vernacular. Her music is as much like the Gershwins', Charles Ives's, and Stephen Sondheim's as it is like Bob Dylan's. Advertisement And yet, even today, no one's music sounds quite like hers. Connie Converse was never found, but her music — mostly unknown in its day — was. We have it now, and it represents a new reference point in the story of American music. Songs such as 'One By One,' 'Talkin' Like You,' 'Incommunicado,' and 'The Age of Noon' are not the quirky, half-baked musings of a minor also-ran: they are the brilliant, fully-realized vision of a sophisticated musical mind worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as any of our greats. When Stekert compared her to Dylan, she was employing hyperbole to express the gobsmacked sense so many feel when we encounter her music for the first time. But Converse, the shy New England girl who left New Hampshire with no direction home, was not the female Bob Dylan. She was Connie Converse. Listen to her album 'How Sad, How Lovely' Howard Fishman is a musician, songwriter, and the author of To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse. Send comments to magazine@
