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Post by KTJ on Sept 3, 2017 14:50:06 GMT 10
from The Washington Post....Japanese survivor of Nagasaki atomic attack bared his scars to plead against nuclear warSumiteru Taniguchi spent almost two years on his stomach as his wounds healed. He would later devote the rest of his life to peace and disarmament.By MATT SCHUDEL | 7:10PM EDT - Saturday, September 02, 2017Sumiteru Taniguchi, a survivor of the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki, in 2015. — Eugene Hoshiko/Associated Press.ON August 9th, 1945, Sumiteru Taniguchi was delivering mail on his bicycle in Nagasaki, Japan. At 11:02 a.m., he noticed a rainbow-like flash and was thrown to the ground.
“When I looked up,” he said in a 1994 interview later broadcast on PBS, “the house I had just passed had been destroyed. The last house to which I distributed mail was still there. I also saw a child blown away. Big stones were flying in the air and one came down and hit me, then flew up again into the sky.”
Mr. Taniguchi, who was 16 at the time, was about one mile from the center of the explosion of the second atomic bomb dropped by U.S. forces on Japan. The city of Hiroshima had been leveled three days earlier. More than 200,000 people were estimated to have been killed in the two blasts.
Within a week of the Nagasaki bombing, Japan surrendered, bringing an end to World War II. Mr. Taniguchi's struggles were just beginning.
After a long, painful recovery, he devoted the rest of his life to peace and disarmament, often baring his scars as a symbol of the horrors of nuclear war.
“I realized that I must live on behalf of those who died unwillingly,” he told author Susan Southard for her 2015 book, “Nagasaki”.
Mr. Taniguchi died August 30th in Nagasaki at age 88, according to a statement from a group he helped lead, the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations. The cause was cancer.
As Mr. Taniguchi tried to climb to his feet after the explosion, “the skin of my left arm, from the shoulder to the tip of my fingers, was dripping like rags,” he said. “I put my hand to my back, but there was no clothing. I could only feel something slimy.”
He retrieved the scattered letters from his mailbag.
“I didn't feel any pain and there was no blood,” he said. “But all my energy seemed to vanish.”
He was carried to a grassy spot on a hill and placed alongside other victims.
“When the morning came,” Mr. Taniguchi said in 1994, “no one lying with me was still alive.”
He was not rescued for three days. He was eventually taken to a Japanese military hospital. His skin was stripped away from his back, exposing his muscles. He spent almost two years lying on his stomach, while his back was suppurating with infections.
“The doctors were clueless about how to treat me,” he said.
In January 1946, a film crew from the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey came to the hospital and recorded Mr. Taniguchi being treated for his wounds. The three minutes of silent color film were so gruesome that they were not shown in public for more than 25 years.
“From shoulders to waist, his raw, bloodred tissue glistens under the lights,” Southard wrote in “Nagasaki”.
Burns and blisters covered much of the rest of his body.
“He cried every time he heard the instrument cart approaching,” Southard wrote, “and when the nurses removed the gauze from his back, he screamed in pain and begged the nurses to let him die. ‘Kill me, kill me’, he cried.”In this 2015 photo, Sumiteru Taniguchi shows a photo of himself taken after the 1945 atomic bomb attack on Nagasaki, Japan. — Eugene Hoshiko/Associated Press.Mr. Taniguchi was not released from the hospital until 1949. He later went back to his job as a mail carrier and was not considered completely healed until 1960, although he continued to have medical problems throughout his life. He dealt with keloid scars and tumors and, despite his ramrod straight posture, never went a day without pain.
At a 2010 United Nations conference to review terms of a treaty on the nonproliferation of nuclear arms, Mr. Taniguchi held up a picture of himself as a young man, with his back exposed on the hospital bed.
“I am not a guinea pig, nor am I an exhibit,” he said. “But you who are here today, please don't turn your eyes away from me. Please look at me again.”
He became one of several prominent hibakusha, or “atomic bomb-affected people,” who spoke out about their suffering, often despite public ridicule of their disfigurement.
“We never received any professional psychological counseling,” Mr. Taniguchi told The Guardian newspaper of Great Britain in 1988, “but in our group of 60 people we've tried to do it for each other — at least to make the survivors talk about that day. We've saved some people from killing themselves.”
Mr. Taniguchi became a determined advocate for the elimination of nuclear arms. He often traveled overseas to speak at conferences, including in the United States, and called for the Japanese government to pay the medical expenses incurred by the survivors.
He noted that the United States had never shown remorse for the damage caused by atomic weapons, but he was even harsher toward his own country.
“No one in the Japanese government has ever apologized about getting involved in that war, either,” he said.
After the end of World War II, Japan adopted a constitutional provision renouncing war and prohibiting the deployment of military forces outside the country's borders. Amid 70th-anniversary observances of the atomic attacks in 2015, new legislation was passed and signed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe allowing Japanese forces to take part in international conflicts.
Mr. Taniguchi denounced the change in policy, calling it a betrayal of the country's pacifist principles.
“I am worried about what will happen to the world,” he said, “when there are no more atomic bomb survivors.”
Sumiteru Taniguchi was born January 26th, 1929, in kiss meuoka, Japan. According to Japanese news reports, his mother died when he was an infant. His father worked for the railroad before being conscripted into the military.
Mr. Taniguchi spent much of his childhood with his maternal parents in Nagasaki before going to work for the postal service at 14.
When he was 24, Mr. Taniguchi had an arranged marriage that was put together by friends and family members.
“My wife never saw me before the wedding and was not told about my injuries,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 2001. “She cried a lot on our honeymoon. It wasn't the scars so much that frightened her, but fear how long I would survive.”
His wife, Eiko, applied lotion to her husband’s scars and massaged his back. She died last year. Survivors include two children; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
In 1986, Southard, who later wrote the book “Nagasaki”, was enlisted as a translator when Mr. Taniguchi came to Washington. She often visited him in Nagasaki and once asked him to describe the significance of his survival, amid such suffering.
“Just that I lived,” he said. “That I have lived this long. I have sadness and struggle that goes with being alive, but I went to the very last edge of life, so I feel joy in the fact that I'm here, now.”• Matt Schudel has been an obituary writer at The Washington Post since 2004.__________________________________________________________________________ Related to this topic:
• He saw a nuclear blast at 9, then spent his life opposing nuclear war and climate changewww.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/japanese-survivor-of-nagasaki-atomic-attack-bared-his-scars-to-plead-against-nuclear-war/2017/09/02/dc70d3a0-8fed-11e7-8df5-c2e5cf46c1e2_story.html
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Post by KTJ on Sept 28, 2017 13:28:43 GMT 10
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Post by jody on Sept 28, 2017 17:37:56 GMT 10
I certainly won't miss him. Exploited women, pervey, creepy, yuck.
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OBITUARIES
Sept 28, 2017 18:59:06 GMT 10
via mobile
Post by Yassir Rebob on Sept 28, 2017 18:59:06 GMT 10
What a legend,RIP to the Heff😜
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Post by KTJ on Sept 29, 2017 14:28:29 GMT 10
from the Los Angeles Times....Hugh Hefner preached sexual liberation, but he never stopped exploiting women's bodiesBy ROBIN ABCARIAN | 3:05PM PDT - Thursday, September 28, 2017Hugh Hefner, seen in 2001, died of natural causes on Wednesday at his Los Angeles home. Over a career that lasted decades, he perfected the exploitation of women's bodies. — Photograph: Glenn Pinkerton/Las Vegas News Bureau.YEARS AGO, I pulled into a long driveway in Holmby Hills, then stopped in front of an imposing wrought-iron gate. I had been directed to announce myself to a large boulder on my left, which I did. The gates swung open.
Suddenly, I was outside the storied Playboy Mansion, a beautiful stone chateau that had become synonymous with orgiastic bacchanals (is that redundant?) tossed by its owner, Hugh Hefner, who died on Wednesday at 91. Those parties — decorated by scantily clad young women — were rites of passage for scores of horny Hollywood types and professional athletes.
As I parked, I realized something was not quite right. A bright plastic baby swing hung from a graceful tree near the mansion’s imposing front door. Children's toys were scattered about. Hefner was married — to Kimberly Conrad, a former Playmate of the Year. Their son, Marston, was a toddler.
People magazine had treated their 1989 marriage as a modern-day miracle: “Next week, Hell freezes over,” it declared.
After Hefner's brief foray into domesticity, he reverted to his former sexual libertinism. He was frequently photographed with an evolving trio of buxom blonde young women. I'm sure there's nothing sexier than being treated interchangeably by a man who has got at least half a century on you.
Hefner married again, in 2012, to a woman 60 years his junior, who has now become his widow.
Anyway, I'd come to the mansion to interview Wendy Hamilton, a 23-year-old from Detroit who had been selected to be Playboy magazine's Miss December 1991. I was told by the magazine people that I was the first reporter they'd ever allowed to witness a centerfold shoot, which I had done some days earlier in the studios of the Playboy building on Sunset Boulevard.
It was the least sexy photo shoot I'd ever seen, but it was the culmination of a girlhood dream for Hamilton. When she was 10, she saw her father's Playboy centerfold calendar in the garage and solemnly told him, “One day, Daddy, I am gonna be one of those girls.”
Who knows how many other little girls were infected by the idea that taking off their clothes for men would be the pinnacle of achievement?ABOVE ALL, Hugh Hefner was in the fantasy business.
Men's fantasies, for sure. But women's fantasies, too. Not their sexual fantasies, mind you. Their fantasies about male attention, self-esteem and success.
It is an enduring irony to me that Hefner, who pushed what he called a “wholesome” version of female sexuality in the pages of his magazine (pretty faces, big boobs, no pubes), probably did more to mainstream the exploitation of women's bodies than any other figure in American history.
Really, he managed one of the greatest cons of all time: In the decades that American women were liberating themselves at home and in the workplace — and actually forcing the creation of new legal concepts like sexual harassment and date rape — he managed to convince many women that taking off their clothes for men's pleasure was not just empowering, but a worthy goal in itself. The deception was also extremely profitable; Hefner became a multimillionaire along the way.
He did not coin the phrase “the male gaze” (credit for that goes to a feminist film critic) but he certainly embodied the aesthetic notion that images of women — and women themselves — exist to please men.
“Playboy,” he once said, “treats women — and men, too, for that matter — as sexual beings, not as sexual objects. In this sense, I think Playboy has been an effective force in the cause of female emancipation.”
That is denial of the highest order. Had he been truly committed to “female emancipation,” he would have embraced the idea that women, not just men, can be sexual their entire lives.
Instead, as you can see from his marriage, his dating history and the pages of his magazine, women have a well-defined shelf life.
After, say the age of 30, they not only expire, but also cease to exist, naked or otherwise.THE PYJAMA-CLAD, pipe-smoking Hefner will remain a paradoxical figure in American culture.
His magazine was a repository of smart journalism. And in years past, the Playboy Foundation supported organizations devoted to laudable goals like reproductive rights and civil liberties.
Certainly, Hefner waged a much-needed battle against the forces of 20th century American puritanism, but sadly, in a way that liberated men (or at least their masturbatory fantasies) by objectifying women.
Eventually, as was bound to happen, the culture passed Playboy by.
The internet and the cellphone conspired to make Playboy-style nudity quaint. In 2015, the magazine announced it would no longer publish fully naked photographs of women, just suggestive ones. By that point, who even cared?
Playboy's effect on the way young women are viewed and treated is irrevocably ingrained in the culture. Look no further than the current grabby occupant of the Oval Office.
I wanted to get a male perspective on Hefner's passing, so I walked over to my father's house. At 88, he's a retired Cal State Northridge English professor and a guy who became something of a swinging single himself after my parents divorced in the late 1970s.
“What did you think of him, Dad?” I asked.
My father leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling for a moment. “Well,” he said, “he really was a sexist.”
Well said, Pops.• Robin Abcarian is a columnist at the Los Angeles Times. Focusing mostly on California culture, news and politics, she roams the Golden State, reporting stories that help readers understand what makes this place unique. Over the past year, she has devoted many columns to helping readers understand the complex issues they would have to consider as they made up their minds about whether to legalize cannabis for adult recreational use. Abcarian has held many positions at the L.A. Times. She covered the 2004, 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns full time, and wrote occasionally about the 2016 campaign. As a culture writer for the paper's Calendar section, she has covered the Oscars, the Emmys and the Sundance Film Festival. For most of the 1990s, she was a columnist for the L.A. Times' feature section, before becoming its editor in 2003.www.latimes.com/local/abcarian/la-me-abcarian-hefner-20170929-story.html
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Post by KTJ on Oct 18, 2017 20:56:53 GMT 10
from The Washington Post....OBITUARY: Daphne Caruana Galizia, journalist who assailed the powerful, dies in car bombingHer reporting, based on the Panama Papers, made her one of Malta's most prominent journalists before her death at 53.By HARRISON SMITH | 9:37PM EDT - Tuesday, October 17, 2017Daphne Caruana Galizia, a Maltese investigative journalist who exposed her island nation's links with the so-called Panama Papers, died when a bomb destroyed her car. — Photograph: Malta Independent/Associated Press.THE FIRST ATTACK came in 1995, when Daphne Caruana Galizia's front door was doused with fuel and set ablaze. She told her three children that the fire had simply been caused by candles, left outside for too long. Privately, she believed that she was targeted for retaliation. Her collie was killed soon after, left in front of her home with a slit throat.
A reform-minded political columnist, Mrs. Caruana Galizia had written an editorial for the Sunday Times of Malta, her country's largest newspaper, calling for the commander of Malta's armed forces to resign because his children had been linked to drug trafficking.
Fearing for her family's safety, she took her own children out of school and for several weeks stayed away from her home in Bidnija, a small town in the hills of one of Europe's smallest countries.
Nothing more came of the story. But in 2006, shortly after she published an article critical of neo-Nazi groups in Malta, a stack of tires was arranged behind her house and set on fire. “My brother happened to be coming home at night and noticed the fire,” her son, Matthew Caruana Galizia, said in a phone interview. “If he hadn't noticed, we probably would have been burned alive.”
Mrs. Caruana Galizia, who faced what her family described as an escalating series of retaliatory attacks for her independent reporting on Maltese politics, died on October 16th after her Peugeot 108 exploded near her home in Bidnija. She was 53.
Malta police are investigating the case with assistance from the FBI, as requested by Malta's prime minister, Joseph Muscat. If Mrs. Caruana Galizia is found to have been targeted, she will be the 28th journalist killed for her work this year, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.Forensic experts walk in a field after a powerful bomb blew up a car and killed Mrs. Caruana Galizia. — Photograph: Darrin Zammit Lupi/Reuters.Mrs. Caruana Galizia was in some ways an unassuming muckraker. Though she established herself early in her career as a scorching political commentator, since 2004 she had run Taste & Flair, a lifestyle magazine published by the Malta Independent newspaper.
Writing and editing the magazine's stories, mainly about Maltese cuisine, was her day job. In her free time, she posted articles to a blog called Running Commentary, a website that made her Malta's most prominent investigative reporter and, as Politico wrote in one recent profile, “a one-woman WikiLeaks”.
On some days, the site drew more than 400,000 readers, a figure that dwarfed the audience of Malta's main newspapers and nearly equaled the country's population. Her posts ranged from commentary on the country's “19th-century” treatment of women to more salacious items, including a report that a Maltese government minister was seen in a German brothel. The minister denied the story and in February received a warrant to freeze Mrs. Caruana Galizia's bank accounts.
Her recent work was fueled by the Panama Papers, a 2016 leak of more than 11 million documents that linked government officials around the world to secretive offshore shell companies. Mrs. Caruana Galizia's work occurred independently of the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative effort led by the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), in partnership with the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and more than 100 other media organizations. (Her son Matthew is a software developer and data journalist with ICIJ.)
In blog posts based on documents from the Panama Papers, she tied Muscat's government — including his wife, chief of staff and energy minister — to several shell companies. She alleged that officials had been receiving illicit payments funneled by the government of Azerbaijan, a former Soviet satellite state.
Officials denied the charges, and Mrs. Caruana Galizia soon faced a deluge of libel threats and suits. In addition, her bull terrier was poisoned and nearly killed earlier this year, Matthew Caruana Galizia said, and one of her younger sons, a Maltese diplomat, was recalled from his post in New Delhi without explanation. Before her death, Matthew said, his mother had planned to sue the government, arguing that the diplomatic ouster was intended as retaliation for her reporting.
“Everyone knows Caruana Galizia was a harsh critic of mine, both politically and personally, but nobody can justify this barbaric act in any way,” Muscat said after Mrs. Caruana Galizia's death.
Malta's government had been in a state of near-disarray since Mrs. Caruana Galizia began publishing her allegations, with Muscat holding snap elections in June in an attempt to solidify his four-year hold on power. Shortly before the election, Ken Mifsud Bonnici, an adviser to the European Commission, wrote that Malta was facing “a veritable collapse of the rule of law”.Daphne Caruana Galizia, the Maltese investigative journalist who was killed by a car bomb. — Photograph: Reuters.In a Facebook post on Tuesday, Matthew Caruana Galizia wrote that his mother “was assassinated because she stood between the rule of law and those who sought to violate it, like many strong journalists.” He blamed the “incompetence and negligence” of the police and government for her death.
“This is what happens when the institutions of the state are incapacitated,” he continued: “The last person left standing is often a journalist. Which makes her the first person left dead.”
Daphne Anne Vella was born in the resort town of Sliema on August 26th, 1964. Her father owned a business that imported and installed elevators, and her mother was a homemaker. She married Peter Caruana Galizia in 1985.
Mrs. Caruana Galizia joined the Times of Malta two years later, working as a reporter and then a columnist before moving to the Malta Independent as an associate editor in 1992. As a columnist, she developed a flair for fiery, opinionated writing that carried over to her blog.
In 1997, she received a bachelor's degree in archaeology from the University of Malta.
In addition to her husband, survivors include their three sons and her mother and father.
Mrs. Caruana Galizia's last post, published a half-hour before her death, described her increasing frustration over a lack of accountability for government corruption. In a court hearing that morning, the prime minister's chief of staff, Keith Schembri, said he had not been able to respond to accusations of corruption because of a “medical condition”.
“There are crooks everywhere you look now,” she wrote. “The situation is desperate.”• Harrison Smith is a reporter on The Washington Post's obituaries desk. He was born in Dallas and joined The Post in 2015.__________________________________________________________________________ Related to this topic:
• Malta journalist killed in car blast was assassinated, her son says
• Foreign experts to help Malta investigate reporter's killing
• Maltese reporter killed by bomb crusaded against corruption
• Bomb kills reporter who covered Malta's ‘Panama Papers’ linkwww.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/daphne-caruana-galizia-journalist-who-assailed-the-powerful-dies-in-car-bombing/2017/10/17/c247e4d4-b345-11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.html
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Post by KTJ on Dec 20, 2017 21:05:47 GMT 10
from The Washington Post....Cardinal Bernard Law, Boston archbishop at center of church sex-abuse scandal, dies at 86He resigned in 2002 amid the darkest crisis to face the Catholic Church in the modern era.By EMILY LANGER | 1:55AM EST — Wednesday, December 20, 2017Cardinal Law speaks at a Mass of healing at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston in 2002. — Photograph: Matt Stone/Reuters.CARDINAL BERNARD F. LAW, the Boston archbishop who became one of the most influential Catholic leaders in the United States before resigning in 2002 amid revelations that he and other prelates had known for years of rampant child molestation by parish priests, a scandal that has been called the church's darkest crisis of the modern era, has died at 86.
The Vatican announced in a statement that Cardinal Law died “after a long illness,” without offering further details. He had been recently hospitalized in Rome.
For more than half a century, Cardinal Law dedicated himself to the church, an institution that became his home after his itinerant upbringing as the son of a commercial and military aviator. As he rose from parish priest to Boston archbishop — the steward of one of the most Catholic American cities — he promoted traditional Catholic doctrine and envisioned the church as a guarantor of social justice in the 20th century.
He began his ministry in segregated Mississippi, where he used his authority as editor of a diocesan publication to denounce racism. Later, as a bishop in Missouri, he made room at a seminary for about 200 Vietnamese men religious who had left their home after the fall of Saigon in 1975.
Law's theology transcended scripture to encompass affordable housing and literacy education. Poor countries, like poor parishes, he argued, at times deserved debt forgiveness from their creditors. Years before Pope John Paul II began his historic efforts to mend the church's scarred relationship with the Jewish community, Cardinal Law sought interreligious dialogue.
On matters of theology, he shared John Paul's doctrinal conservatism. He became one of the pope's “point men” in the United States, said David Gibson, an authority on the Catholic Church, as John Paul sought to reshape its ranks by identifying like-minded priests and installing them as bishops, archbishops and cardinals.
But controversy engulfed Cardinal Law in the early 2000s, when a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation by The Boston Globe, later dramatized in the Academy Award-winning film “Spotlight”, led to revelations that church officials had covered up sexual abuse in the priesthood for decades by shuffling alleged offenders among parishes.
Cardinal Law was never accused of committing sexual abuse, and he denounced the offense as a “terrible evil”. But for many Catholics as well as non-Catholics, he became a symbol of the church's failure to protect the young from priests who exploited the trust that traditionally accompanies their role.
“While I would hope that it would be understood that I never intended to place a priest in a position where I felt he would be a risk to children,” Cardinal Law said in an apology in November 2002, “the fact of the matter remains that I did assign priests who had committed sexual abuse.”
In the course of legal proceedings arising from the scandal, Cardinal Law was called to give depositions in several civil cases and, in February 2003, appeared before a criminal grand jury considering potential indictments of him and other high-ranking Boston-area prelates.
Later that year, then-Massachusetts attorney general Thomas F. Reilly concluded that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute the Boston archdiocese or its leaders. But his office released a report on the matter, declaring that “the mistreatment of children was so massive and so prolonged that it borders on the unbelievable.”
Although not bearing sole responsibility for the wrongdoing, Cardinal Law, the report found, “had direct knowledge of the scope, duration and severity of the crisis experienced by children in the Archdiocese; he participated directly in crucial decisions concerning the assignment of abusive priests, decisions that typically increased the risk to children.”
Among the most notorious offenders in the Boston area was Father John J. Geoghan. Church documents unearthed as the scandal was uncovered showed that Cardinal Law had known of accusations against Geoghan and still permitted the priest to continue his pastoral work. In all, Geoghan would be accused of abusing 150 children, mainly boys, over decades and in numerous parishes.
Another priest, Peter J. Frost, was removed from active ministry in 1992 and later described himself in a letter to Cardinal Law as a “sex addict,” also revealing that one of his victims had committed suicide.
In later correspondence, Cardinal Law told Frost he hoped the priest would one day “return to an appropriate ministry, bringing with [him] the wisdom which emerges from difficult experience.” Frost was ultimately removed from the clerical state.Cardinal Law, center, appears in Boston's Suffolk County Superior Court in 2002 for a hearing in the Geoghan case. — Photograph: George Martell/The Boston Herald.In a 2002 civil deposition related to the case of Paul R. Shanley, a priest who was later defrocked and then convicted in 2005 of child rape and other charges, Cardinal Law presented himself as a leader who had delegated many personnel matters to his subordinates.
He attributed the shroud of secrecy about abusive priests to concern for victims and their privacy. A victims' lawyer pressed him on the point, suggesting that “there have been other focuses, have there not, Cardinal Law?”
“There have been and there are,” he replied, according to an account in The Globe.
“One of those has been to avoid scandal in the church?” the lawyer asked.
“That's correct,” Cardinal Law said.
As reports mounted of coverups in dioceses around the world, some church leaders argued that they had been ignorant of the trauma of sexual abuse and that they had treated offending priests not as criminals, but as sinners deserving of mercy. That defense was insufficient for many victims and other critics, who charged that church officials — exemplified by Cardinal Law — had guarded their ranks at the expense of children.
“Many could read his career as a cautionary tale about the perils of power in the church,” said Gibson, a national reporter for the Religion News Service and author of “The Coming Catholic Church” (2003). “He became a creature of and a victim of the clerical culture…. There were bishops right, left and center who did the same things that he did.”
Cardinal Law stepped down as archbishop on December 13th, 2002, and later moved to Rome, where he served, until shortly before his 80th birthday, as archpriest of a basilica. His stature, achieved after years of ecclesiastical leadership, made his downfall particularly painful for the faithful who continued to love the church while recognizing that it had grievously erred.An itinerant childhoodBernard Francis Law was born on November 4th, 1931, in Torreón, Mexico. His father, a pilot, was Catholic; his mother was Presbyterian before converting to her husband's faith.
As a youth, Cardinal Law made frequent moves with his parents, including to Colombia, Panama and the Virgin Islands. In St. Thomas, he was elected president of his mostly black senior class, according to a biographical sketch in the book “Boston's Cardinal: Bernard Law, the Man and His Witness” (2002).
He studied medieval history at Harvard University, from which he graduated in 1953. After completing his religious training at St. Joseph Seminary in Louisiana and the Pontifical College Josephinum in Ohio, he was ordained in 1961.
His first assignment was in the Natchez-Jackson diocese in Mississippi. Amid boiling racial hatred, the young priest helped found and then led an interfaith council on human relations. A Unitarian minister who served with him was shot, according to the biographical sketch, and the home of a rabbi was bombed. Cardinal Law reportedly received death threats.
Later, in Washington, he joined the organization now known as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and led a committee on interreligious understanding. He served as bishop of Springfield-Cape Girardeau in Missouri before succeeding Humberto Medeiros as archbishop of Boston's 2 million Catholics in 1984. The next year, he was elevated to cardinal, a prince of the church.
In Boston, Cardinal Law was credited with helping to ease race relations during the divisive court-ordered busing for public schools. He urged voters to make abortion, which the Catholic Church opposes, “the critical issue” in elections. Politically well-connected, he spoke as frequently as once a month with George H.W. Bush during his presidency, The Boston Globe reported.
In international affairs, Cardinal Law became a visible envoy for the church. He met with Cuban leader Fidel Castro eight years before John Paul's historic visit to the Communist country in 1998, traveled to Vietnam, and led humanitarian relief efforts after natural disasters in Latin America.Cardinal Law was pursued by reporters as he arrived in Rome in April 2002. — Photograph: Associated Press.In 2002, as the sexual-abuse scandal intensified, The Washington Post interviewed Thomas H. O'Connor, a historian at Boston College who had followed Cardinal Law's career. Reflecting on his accomplishments, O'Connor paraphrased a line from Shakespeare's tragedy “Julius Caesar”.
“There's going to be a lot of good,” the historian said, “interred with his bones.”‘Betraying the sacred trust’Cardinal Law's public response to sexual abuse within the clergy could be traced at least to 1992, when he was confronted by claims that a former Massachusetts priest, James R. Porter, had molested dozens of children in the 1960s. Cardinal Law decried “the tragedy of a priest betraying the sacred trust of priestly service” but described abusive clergy as “the rare exception”.
In 1993, Porter was sentenced to 18 to 20 years in prison. Three years later, a Waltham, Massachusetts, woman filed the first in what would be a raft of lawsuits against another priest — Geoghan — whom she said had abused her three sons.
Through a lawyer, Cardinal Law admitted that, as archbishop in September 1984, he was advised of accusations that Geoghan had molested seven boys. Geoghan nonetheless was transferred to another parish, where he was permitted to lead altar boys. Reports of abuse continued.
“It is most heartening to know that things have gone well for you and that you are ready to resume your efforts with a renewed zeal and enthusiasm,” Cardinal Law wrote to Geoghan in 1989, as reported by The Boston Globe, after moving the priest to his new parish. Church records showed that Geoghan had been medically cleared for work.
In 1998, under Cardinal Law's leadership and with John Paul's approval, Geoghan was defrocked. He was strangled in 2003 by a fellow inmate at a correctional facility in Massachusetts, where he was serving a prison sentence for fondling a boy at a pool.
The Boston archdiocese reached settlements with many of Geoghan's reported victims. Such settlements, made in dioceses across the United States, were estimated to have cost the church more than $2 billion.
In January 2002, Cardinal Law issued a public apology for his reassignment of Geoghan. In the same announcement — belatedly, to many critics — he said that priests would be required to notify law enforcement authorities of alleged sexual abuse.
In the ensuing months, Cardinal Law came under growing pressure to resign. His public expressions of remorse culminated with his remarks in November 2002, at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston, where he said that “the forgiving love of God gives me the courage to beg forgiveness of those who have suffered because of what I did.”
He acknowledged the “devastating effects of this horrible sin” — substance abuse, depression, in some cases suicide — and sought to assuage the sense of shame many victims suffer by assuring them that the perpetrators were to blame. He urged anyone living “with the awful secret of sexual abuse by clergy or by anyone else to come forward so that you may begin to experience healing.”
“No one is helped by keeping such things secret,” he said. “The secret of sexual abuse needs to be brought out of the darkness and into the healing light of Jesus Christ.”
His resignation came the following month. Cardinal Law later was a chaplain at the Sisters of Mercy of Alma convent in Clinton, Maryland, and maintained posts on Vatican committees, including the one that nominates bishops.
He assumed his post at the papal basilica of Saint Mary Major in 2004. After John Paul's death in the next year, Cardinal Law participated in the conclave that selected Joseph Ratzinger, later Benedict XVI, as the new pope.
Cardinal Law had no known immediate survivors.
In his apology at the Boston cathedral, he reflected on the priests whom he had known in his youth, and who had made an enduring impact on his life.
“They represented all that was good to me,” said Cardinal Law. “Like countless others, I placed great trust in them.”• Emily Langer is a reporter on The Washington Post's obituaries desk. She has written about national and world leaders, celebrated figures in science and the arts, and heroes from all walks of life. www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/cardinal-bernard-law-boston-archbishop-at-center-of-church-sex-abuse-scandal-dies-at-86/2017/12/20/8e679e8c-e533-11e7-833f-155031558ff4_story.html
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Post by Deleted on Dec 21, 2017 6:22:31 GMT 10
Now if the Catholic Law has it priest are allowed to marry....Law would have a good eulogy instead of one a kiddy fiddler.
So it goes now he is going to burn in hell for eternity.
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Post by KTJ on Dec 21, 2017 6:26:18 GMT 10
So it goes now he is going to burn in hell for eternity. Hell is a delusional concept dreamed up by religionists to scare people who DARE to ignore or speak out against their unproven god bullshit.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 21, 2017 6:29:51 GMT 10
For me and you KTJ that's a fair comment....not if your a believer though ...its burn baby burn...
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Post by KTJ on Feb 1, 2018 11:17:59 GMT 10
Pat Booth was an “old school” investigative journalist. Sadly, he and his peers are rapidly disappearing as many news organisations go for the lowest common demoninator and only report on the easy, low-hanging fruit instead of spending the money on quality journalism. It was particularly noticeable in New Zealand after Australian news media organisations bought out most of our newspapers, and over a short period of time, laid off the “quality journalists” and started publishing more and more trashy “fluff”. from STUFF/Fairfax NZ....Auckland journalist Pat Booth dies aged 88By HARRISON CHRISTIAN | 4:18PM — Wednesday, 31 January 2018Veteran journalist Pat Booth. — Photograph: Fiona Goodall.AUCKLAND JOURNALIST Pat Booth has died aged 88.
Booth was known for his stories about the “Mr Asia” drug syndicate in the 1970s, and his coverage of the Arthur Allan Thomas case in the same decade.
He was assistant editor of the Auckland Star when he attended Thomas' retrial in 1973, and became concerned about the police case.
Thomas was wrongfully convicted of the murders of Harvey and Jeannette Crew after police fabricated evidence against him; one of the first cases of major public erosion of trust in police.
Booth wrote a book, “Trial by Ambush”, campaigning for Thomas to be pardoned.
The campaign was ultimately successful, with Thomas receiving a Royal Pardon and compensation of $950,000 for his nine years in prison.
A Royal Commission report stated officers had used a rifle and ammunition taken from Thomas' farm to fabricate evidence against him.Pat Booth talks to Allan Thomas and Ray Thomas, family members of Arthur Allan Thomas.It was also Booth who dubbed Kiwi drug trafficker Marty Johnstone “Mr Asia” in a series of stories for the Auckland Star in 1978.
He uncovered Johnstone's international drug syndicate and pursued it for more than a year — a crusade that led to death threats and break-ins at his family home.
Booth died in a Kumeu rest home on Wednesday.
Fairfax Media's former head of Auckland suburban newspapers, Matthew Gray, worked under Booth when he was editor-in-chief, and was mentored by him before taking on the role himself.
He said Booth was a stalwart of his community and a formidable investigative journalist.
“He was a man of superior intellect and wit, and it was a privilege to work with him and to benefit from his wisdom,” said Gray.
“He certainly led the way in New Zealand journalism and it was great to see him in action and just be a part of the whole Pat Booth world, and it's a great shame that he's passed on; there will never be another one like him.”Pat Booth's legacy will be long remembered, former colleagues say. — Photograph: Fiona Goodall.PJ Taylor, news director for STUFF's Eastern Courier and Papakura Courier, described Booth as a “pioneering journalism legend”.
“People often struggle to remember the names of journalists in New Zealand, but Pat Booth was one that stuck,” said Taylor.
“It was a sign of respect for his integrity and impartiality that Pat Booth was probably the only journalist in Auckland that could hold a senior journalism job and be a people's elected representative, at the same time.”
“That was during the early 2000s, when Pat was a much-admired East Auckland resident and chairman of the Howick Community Board, in the former Manukau City Council jurisdiction, while being our editor-in-chief at Suburban Newspapers Ltd.”
Outside of the general news rounds, Booth was also an avid sports fan and penned a biography about the All Black Don “The Boot” Clarke, which was a national best-seller, Taylor said.
“His passing is really the end on an era for the pioneering campaigning journalist.”
More than 60 years after he started as a rookie reporter at the Hawera Star, Booth was a columnist for Fairfax Media in his later years. He was also a member of the Waitemata District Health Board for more than a decade.
The DHB's chief executive Dr Dale Bramley said Booth's legacy would be long remembered.
“Pat always had the community at heart. He was a great New Zealander who always got to the truth of the matter and endeavoured to make things better for his fellow man.”__________________________________________________________________________ Related to this topic: • Off Pat — The world of Pat Booth • Waitemata DHB says goodbye to renowned journalistwww.stuff.co.nz/auckland/101049609
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Post by KTJ on Feb 22, 2018 9:03:34 GMT 10
He was the ultimate bullshit artist.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 22, 2018 15:19:58 GMT 10
Showman...
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Post by KTJ on Mar 14, 2018 16:27:08 GMT 10
from The Washington Post....Stephen Hawking, physicist who came to symbolize the power of the human mind, dies at 76Hawking overcame a devastating neurological disease to probe the greatest mysteries of the cosmos and become one of the planet's most renowned science popularizers.By JOEL ACHENBACH and BOYCE RENSBERGER | 12:01AM EDT — Wednesday, March 14, 2018Physicist Stephen Hawking sits on stage during an announcement of the Breakthrough Starshot initiative with investor Yuri Milner in New York April 12th, 2016. — Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters.STEPHEN W. HAWKING, the British theoretical physicist who overcame a devastating neurological disease to probe the greatest mysteries of the cosmos and become a globally celebrated symbol of the power of the human mind, has died at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 76.
His family announced the death but did not provide any further details.
Unable to move a muscle, speechless but for a computer-synthesized voice, Dr. Hawking had suffered since the age of 21 from a degenerative motor neuron disease similar to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease.
Initially given two years to live, a diagnosis that threw him into a profound depression, he found the strength to complete his doctorate and rise to the position of Lucasian professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge, the same post held by Isaac Newton 300 years earlier.
Dr. Hawking eventually became one of the planet's most renowned science popularizers, and he embraced the attention, traveling the world, meeting with presidents, visiting Antarctica and Easter Island, and flying on a special “zero-gravity” jet whose parabolic flight let Dr. Hawking float through the cabin as if he were in outer space.
“My goal is simple,” he once said. “It is complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.” He spent much of his career searching for a way to reconcile Einstein's theory of relativity with quantum physics and produce a “Theory of Everything”.
He wrote an international best seller, “A Brief History of Time” (1988), which delved into the origin and ultimate fate of the universe. He deliberately set out to write a mass-market primer on an often incomprehensible subject.
Although the book was sometimes derided as being dense, and had a reputation for being owned more than read, it sold millions of copies, was translated into more than 20 languages, and inspired a mini-empire of similar books from Dr. Hawking, including “The Universe in a Nutshell” and “A Briefer History of Time”.
With his daughter, Lucy, he wrote a series of children's books about a young intergalactic traveler named George. His blunt 2013 memoir, “My Brief History”, explored his development in science as well as his turbulent marriages. In addition, Dr. Hawking was the subject of a 1991 documentary, “A Brief History of Time”, directed by Errol Morris, and countless newspaper and magazine articles.
With the aid of a voice synthesizer, controlled by his fingers on a keyboard, he gave speeches around the world, from Chile to China. He played himself on such TV programs as “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “The Simpsons”, the latter featuring Dr. Hawking telling the show's lazy animated patriarch, “Your theory of a doughnut-shaped universe is interesting, Homer. I may have to steal it.”
He insisted that his reputation as the second coming of Albert Einstein had gotten out of control through “media hype”.
“I fit the part of a disabled genius,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. “At least, I'm disabled — even though I'm not a genius like Einstein…. The public wants heroes. They made Einstein a hero, and now they're making me a hero, though with much less justification.”
His scientific achievements included breakthroughs in understanding the extreme conditions of black holes, objects so dense that not even light can escape their gravity.
His most famous theoretical breakthrough was to find an exception to this seemingly unforgiving law of physics: black holes are not really black, he realized, but rather can emanate thermal radiation from subatomic processes at their boundary, and can potentially evaporate. Scientists refer to such theoretical emanations as “Hawking radiation”.
This revelation impressed other scientists with the way it took Einstein's general theory of relativity, which is essential for understanding the gravity of black holes, and connected it to newer theories of quantum mechanics, which cover subatomic processes.
Plus, he threw in a dash of old-fashioned thermodynamics — achieving a kind of physics trifecta.
“Black holes ain't as black as they are painted,” Dr. Hawking once said in a lecture, characteristically describing complicated physics in ordinary language. “They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. Things can get out of a black hole, both to the outside, and possibly, to another universe. So, if you feel you are in a black hole, don't give up. There's a way out.”
He also hypothesized that miniature black holes, remnants of the big bang, may be strewn through space, though he noted that so far they haven't be discovered. “This is a pity, because if they had, I would have got a Nobel prize,” he joked.Early lifeStephen William Hawking was born in Oxford, England, on January 8th, 1942 — the 300th anniversary of Galileo's death, he liked to point out. His father was a physician and specialist in tropical diseases; his mother was active in the Liberal Party.
Both parents were Oxford-educated, and Stephen — the eldest of four siblings — grew up surrounded by books. But he did not show particular academic promise, despite an obvious streak of brilliance that caused his friends to nickname him “Einstein”.
“I always wanted to know how everything worked,” he told Omni magazine. “I would take things apart to see how they worked, but they didn't often go back together.”
He was a bit lazy, and a bon vivant, as he later would admit. After being admitted to the University of Oxford, he skimped on his studies and enjoyed carousing with fellow members of the Oxford Boat Club, for which he was a tactically savvy coxswain. He graduated in 1962 and did just well enough on his final exam to earn admission to the University of Cambridge to pursue a doctorate.
“Physics was always the most boring subject at school because it was so easy and obvious. Chemistry was much more fun because unexpected things, such as explosions, kept happening,” Dr. Hawking wrote in his memoir. “But physics and astronomy offered the hope of understanding where we came from and why we are here. I wanted to fathom the depths of the Universe.”
Then came what he later referred to as “that terrible thing.” He'd noticed at Oxford that he'd become increasingly clumsy and would sometimes stumble and fall for no obvious reason. Tests revealed motor neuron disease; he could not expect to live more than a couple of years.
After a period of despondency in which he holed up in his room and listened to Wagner, he attended a New Year's Eve party at which he met a young student named Jane Wilde. Their courtship spurred his will to live. They married in 1965.
“We had this very strong sense at the time that our generation lived anyway under this most awful nuclear cloud — that with a four-minute warning the world itself could likely end,” Jane Hawking later told the British newspaper The Observer. “That made us feel above all that we had to do our bit, that we had to follow an idealistic course in life. That may seem naive now, but that was exactly the spirit in which Stephen and I set out in the Sixties — to make the most of whatever gifts were given us.”
They would have three children before his condition deteriorated to near-complete paralysis.
He received a doctorate in 1966 and became a post-graduate research physicist at Cambridge, where he hoped to study under the celeberated astrophysicist Fred Hoyle. Instead, he was assigned to Dennis Sciama — a disappointment, at first.
But, as he later wrote, “This turned out to be a good thing. Hoyle was abroad a lot and I wouldn't have seen much of him. Sciama on the other hand was there, and was always stimulating.”
A few years later, while on the staff of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, he formed a close collaboration with Cambridge colleague Roger Penrose. They developed a theorem that the universe has not always existed.
The two showed that if the theory of relativity is true, the universe must have sprung into existence, out of what appeared to be nothing, at a specific moment in the past and from a place where gravity became so strong that space and time are curved beyond recognition — what is known as a “singularity”.
At the remarkably young age of 32, Dr. Hawking was named a fellow of the Royal Society. He received the Albert Einstein Award, the most prestigious in theoretical physics. He joined the Cambridge faculty in 1973 as a research assistant in the department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics; he was promoted to professor of gravitational physics in 1977.Early fameWhile at Cambridge, Dr. Hawking began to question the big-bang theory, which by then most people had accepted.
Perhaps, he suggested, there was never a start and would be no end, but just change — a constant transition of one “universe” giving way to another through glitches in space-time. All the while, Dr. Hawking was digging into exploding black holes, string theory and the birth of black holes in our galaxy.
Dr. Hawking was known to weigh in rather playfully on grand cosmological questions. He once suggested that if the universe stopped expanding and began to contract, time would run backward. He later said that he'd changed his mind on that.
He gained headlines when he declared that humans should colonize other worlds to hedge their bets against the possible destruction of this one.
In an updated, illustrated (easier to handle) version of “A Brief History of Time”, he added a chapter on wormholes — back-alley cosmic tunnels that might conceivably let someone travel back in time. Prancing on the edge of the plausible, he nonetheless stuck to what science can tell us.
“He thought about the deep and important questions in novel ways,” said David Spergel, Princeton University's chairman of astrophysics. “Hawking's important contribution was identifying new ways to answer those questions and formulating mathematically sophisticated ways of connecting general relativity and quantum mechanics.”
Dr. Hawking had sought to come up with a so-called Theory of Everything that would essentially put an end to theoretical physics by answering all the outstanding questions. But whether such a theory can ever be found is unclear.
Dr. Hawking said our universe might not be the only one there is — that many more may be popping into existence all around us. He suggested that “cosmic wormholes” briefly link those universes to ours and that subatomic particles may travel from one universe to another through them, accounting for some of the strange behavior of particles that physicists observe.
The power of Dr. Hawking's celebrity was measured at times by the tabloid coverage he drew for his complicated personal life. His wife Jane spent hours every day bathing, washing and feeding Dr. Hawking, who required constant nursing care. He developed pneumonia in 1985 on a trip to Geneva, and Jane battled doctors who wanted to turn off his life support.
But the marriage grew strained, in part because of her Christian faith and his adamant atheism, and in part because of what she called his remote and stoic temperament. She described him as an “all-powerful emperor” who seemed blind to how demanding his illness became for her as she also took care of their young children. He refused measures that would have made life easier for her, and she felt it was “too cruel” to coerce him to see it her way.
They grew apart and, in 1990, just shy of their 25th wedding anniversary, separated when Dr. Hawking left Jane for his nurse, Elaine Mason. He married Elaine five years later after his divorce from Jane became final. Dr. Hawking called his second marriage, which also ended in divorce, “passionate and tempestuous”.
Survivors include his children, Lucy, Robert and Tim.
Dr. Hawking's offices were filled with photographs of him standing with admirers ranging from popes (he was a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences) to the late Soviet physicist and human rights campaigner Andrei Sakharov.
The theoretical physicist once described his heroes as “Galileo, Einstein, Darwin and Marilyn Monroe”. The last was of particular appeal to the scientist who hung posters of her and collected Monroe-related bric a brac.
“My daughter and secretary gave me posters of her, my son gave me a Marilyn bag and my wife a Marilyn towel,” he once said. “I suppose you could say she was a model of the universe.”__________________________________________________________________________ • Joel Achenbach covers science and politics for the National desk at The Washington Post. He has been a staff writer for The Post since 1990. • Boyce Rensberger is a former Washington Post science writer and editor. www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/stephen-hawking-physicist-who-came-to-symbolize-the-power-of-the-human-mind-dies-at-76/2018/03/14/d4298e14-273a-11e8-874b-d517e912f125_story.html
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Post by KTJ on Mar 14, 2018 16:33:44 GMT 10
That comprehensive obituary from The Washington Post was on their website within fiften minutes of the first “breaking news” story about Stephen Hawking's death.
And that is nothing compared to the HUGE obituary published by The New York Times at about the same time (I'll post that one later after I format it).
Which I guess is proof that both newspapers already had an obituary written for Stephen Hawking, which they merely dug out, filled in a few minor blanks, then published.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 14, 2018 16:51:55 GMT 10
Did he die or is it just a theory...??
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Post by KTJ on Mar 15, 2018 10:05:35 GMT 10
from The New York Times....Stephen Hawking, Who Examined the Universe and Explained Black Holes, Dies at 76A physicist and best-selling author, Dr. Hawking did not allow his physical limitations to hinder his quest to answer “the big question: Where did the universe come from?”By DENNIS OVERBYE | Wednesday, March 14, 2018Stephen Hawking became a leader in exploring gravity and the properties of black holes. His work led to a turning point in the history of modern physics. — Photograph: Terry Smith/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.STEPHEN W. HAWKING, the Cambridge University physicist and best-selling author who roamed the cosmos from a wheelchair, pondering the nature of gravity and the origin of the universe and becoming an emblem of human determination and curiosity, died early on Wednesday at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 76.
His death was confirmed by a spokesman for Cambridge University.
“Not since Albert Einstein has a scientist so captured the public imagination and endeared himself to tens of millions of people around the world,” Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York, said in an interview.
Dr. Hawking did that largely through his book “A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes”, published in 1988. It has sold more than 10 million copies and inspired a documentary film by Errol Morris. The 2014 film about his life, “The Theory of Everything”, was nominated for several Academy Awards and Eddie Redmayne, who played Dr. Hawking, won the Oscar for best actor.
Scientifically, Dr. Hawking will be best remembered for a discovery so strange that it might be expressed in the form of a Zen koan: When is a black hole not black? When it explodes.
What is equally amazing is that he had a career at all. As a graduate student in 1963, he learned he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neuromuscular wasting disease also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. He was given only a few years to live.
The disease reduced his bodily control to the flexing of a finger and voluntary eye movements but left his mental faculties untouched.
He went on to become his generation's leader in exploring gravity and the properties of black holes, the bottomless gravitational pits so deep and dense that not even light can escape them.
That work led to a turning point in modern physics, playing itself out in the closing months of 1973 on the walls of his brain when Dr. Hawking set out to apply quantum theory, the weird laws that govern subatomic reality, to black holes. In a long and daunting calculation, Dr. Hawking discovered to his befuddlement that black holes — those mythological avatars of cosmic doom — were not really black at all. In fact, he found, they would eventually fizzle, leaking radiation and particles, and finally explode and disappear over the eons.
Nobody, including Dr. Hawking, believed it at first — that particles could be coming out of a black hole. “I wasn't looking for them at all,” he recalled in an interview in 1978. “I merely tripped over them. I was rather annoyed.”
That calculation, in a thesis published in 1974 in the journal Nature under the title “Black Hole Explosions?”, is hailed by scientists as the first great landmark in the struggle to find a single theory of nature — to connect gravity and quantum mechanics, those warring descriptions of the large and the small, to explain a universe that seems stranger than anybody had thought.
The discovery of Hawking radiation, as it is known, turned black holes upside down. It transformed them from destroyers to creators — or at least to recyclers — and wrenched the dream of a final theory in a strange, new direction.
“You can ask what will happen to someone who jumps into a black hole,” Dr. Hawking said in an interview in 1978. “I certainly don't think he will survive it.
“On the other hand,” he added, “if we send someone off to jump into a black hole, neither he nor his constituent atoms will come back, but his mass energy will come back. Maybe that applies to the whole universe.”Dr. Hawking pushed the limits in his professional and personal life. In 2007, when he was 65, he took part in a zero-gravity flight aboard a specially equipped Boeing 727. — Photograph: Zero Gravity Corporation/Associated Press.Dennis W. Sciama, a cosmologist and Dr. Hawking's thesis adviser at Cambridge, called Hawking's thesis in Nature “the most beautiful paper in the history of physics.”
Edward Witten, a theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, said: “Trying to understand Hawking's discovery better has been a source of much fresh thinking for almost 40 years now, and we are probably still far from fully coming to grips with it. It still feels new.”
In 2002, Dr. Hawking said he wanted the formula for Hawking radiation to be engraved on his tombstone.
He was a man who pushed the limits — in his intellectual life, to be sure, but also in his professional and personal lives. He traveled the globe to scientific meetings, visiting every continent, including Antarctica; wrote best-selling books about his work; married twice; fathered three children; and was not above appearing on “The Simpsons”, “Star Trek: The Next Generation” or “The Big Bang Theory”.
He celebrated his 60th birthday by going up in a hot-air balloon. The same week, he also crashed his electric-powered wheelchair while speeding around a corner in Cambridge, breaking his leg.
In April 2007, a few months after his 65th birthday, he took part in a zero-gravity flight aboard a specially equipped Boeing 727, a padded aircraft that flies a roller-coaster trajectory to produce fleeting periods of weightlessness. It was a prelude to a hoped-for trip to space with Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic company aboard SpaceShipTwo.
Asked why he took such risks, Dr. Hawking said, “I want to show that people need not be limited by physical handicaps as long as they are not disabled in spirit.”
His own spirit left many in awe.
“What a triumph his life has been,” said Martin Rees, a Cambridge University cosmologist, the astronomer royal of England and Dr. Hawking's longtime colleague. “His name will live in the annals of science; millions have had their cosmic horizons widened by his best-selling books; and even more, around the world, have been inspired by a unique example of achievement against all the odds — a manifestation of amazing willpower and determination.”Studies came EasyStephen William Hawking was born in Oxford, England, on January 8, 1942 — 300 years to the day, he liked to point out, after the death of Galileo, who had begun the study of gravity. His mother, the former Isobel Walker, had gone to Oxford to avoid the bombs that fell nightly during the Blitz of London. His father, Frank Hawking, was a prominent research biologist.
The oldest of four children, Stephen was a mediocre student at St. Albans School in London, though his innate brilliance was recognized by some classmates and teachers.
Later, at University College, Oxford, he found his studies in mathematics and physics so easy that he rarely consulted a book or took notes. He got by with a thousand hours of work in three years, or one hour a day, he estimated. “Nothing seemed worth making an effort for,” he said.
The only subject he found exciting was cosmology because, he said, it dealt with “the big question: Where did the universe come from?”Dr. Hawking and his first wife, the former Jane Wilde, in 1990. The couple married in 1965. He said the marriage gave him “something to live for”. — Photograph: David Montgomery/Getty Images.Upon graduation, he moved to Cambridge. Before he could begin his research, however, he was stricken by what his research adviser, Dr. Sciama, came to call “that terrible thing.”
The young Hawking had been experiencing occasional weakness and falling spells for several years. Shortly after his 21st birthday, in 1963, doctors told him that he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. They gave him less than three years to live.
His first response was severe depression. He dreamed he was going to be executed, he said. Then, against all odds, the disease appeared to stabilize. Though he was slowly losing control of his muscles, he was still able to walk short distances and perform simple tasks, though laboriously, like dressing and undressing. He felt a new sense of purpose.
“When you are faced with the possibility of an early death,” he recalled, “it makes you realize that life is worth living and that there are a lot of things you want to do.”
In 1965, he married Jane Wilde, a student of linguistics. Now, by his own account, he not only had “something to live for”; he also had to find a job, which gave him an incentive to work seriously toward his doctorate.
His illness, however, had robbed him of the ability to write down the long chains of equations that are the tools of the cosmologist's trade. Characteristically, he turned this handicap into a strength, gathering his energies for daring leaps of thought, which, in his later years, he often left for others to codify in proper mathematical language.
“People have the mistaken impression that mathematics is just equations,” Dr. Hawking said. “In fact, equations are just the boring part of mathematics.”
By necessity, he concentrated on problems that could be attacked through “pictures and diagrams,” adopting geometric techniques that had been devised in the early 1960s by the mathematician Roger Penrose and a fellow Cambridge colleague, Brandon Carter, to study general relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity.
Black holes are a natural prediction of that theory, which explains how mass and energy “curve” space, the way a sleeping person causes a mattress to sag. Light rays will bend as they traverse a gravitational field, just as a marble rolling on the sagging mattress will follow an arc around the sleeper.
Too much mass or energy in one spot could cause space to sag without end; an object that was dense enough, like a massive collapsing star, could wrap space around itself like a magician's cloak and disappear, shrinking inside to a point of infinite density called a singularity, a cosmic dead end, where the known laws of physics would break down: a black hole.
Einstein himself thought this was absurd when the possibility was pointed out to him.
Using the Hubble Space Telescope and other sophisticated tools of observation and analysis, however, astronomers have identified hundreds of objects that are too massive and dark to be anything but black holes, including a super-massive one at the center of the Milky Way. According to current theory, the universe should contain billions more.
As part of his Ph.D. thesis in 1966, Dr. Hawking showed that when you ran the film of the expanding universe backward, you would find that such a singularity had to have existed sometime in cosmic history; space and time, that is, must have had a beginning. He, Dr. Penrose and a rotating cast of colleagues went on to publish a series of theorems about the behavior of black holes and the dire fate of anything caught in them.Dr. Hawking in his office at the University of Cambridge in December 2011. His only complaint about his speech synthesizer, which was manufactured in California, was that it gave him an American accent. — Photograph: Sarah Lee/London Science Museum/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.A Calculation in His HeadDr. Hawking's signature breakthrough resulted from a feud with the Israeli theoretical physicist Jacob Bekenstein, then a Princeton graduate student, about whether black holes could be said to have entropy, a thermodynamic measure of disorder. Dr. Bekenstein said they could, pointing out a close analogy between the laws that Dr. Hawking and his colleagues had derived for black holes and the laws of thermodynamics.
Dr. Hawking said no. To have entropy, a black hole would have to have a temperature. But warm objects, from a forehead to a star, radiate a mixture of electromagnetic radiation, depending on their exact temperatures. Nothing could escape a black hole, and so its temperature had to be zero. “I was very down on Bekenstein,” Dr. Hawking recalled.
To settle the question, Dr. Hawking decided to investigate the properties of atom-size black holes. This, however, required adding quantum mechanics, the paradoxical rules of the atomic and subatomic world, to gravity, a feat that had never been accomplished. Friends turned the pages of quantum theory textbooks as Dr. Hawking sat motionless staring at them for months. They wondered if he was finally in over his head.
When he eventually succeeded in doing the calculation in his head, it indicated to his surprise that particles and radiation were spewing out of black holes. Dr. Hawking became convinced that his calculation was correct when he realized that the outgoing radiation would have a thermal spectrum characteristic of the heat radiated by any warm body, from a star to a fevered forehead. Dr. Bekenstein had been right.
Dr. Hawking even figured out a way to explain how particles might escape a black hole. According to quantum principles, the space near a black hole would be teeming with “virtual” particles that would flash into existence in matched particle-and-anti-particle pairs — like electrons and their evil twin opposites, positrons — out of energy borrowed from the hole's intense gravitational field.
They would then meet and annihilate each other in a flash of energy, repaying the debt for their brief existence. But if one of the pair fell into the black hole, the other one would be free to wander away and become real. It would appear to be coming from the black hole and taking energy away from it.
But those, he cautioned, were just words. The truth was in the math.
“The most important thing about Hawking radiation is that it shows that the black hole is not cut off from the rest of the universe,” Dr. Hawking said.
It also meant that black holes had a temperature and had entropy. In thermodynamics, entropy is a measure of wasted heat. But it is also a measure of the amount of information — the number of bits — needed to describe what is in a black hole. Curiously, the number of bits is proportional to the black hole's surface area, not its volume, meaning that the amount of information you could stuff into a black hole is limited by its area, not, as one might naïvely think, its volume.
That result has become a litmus test for string theory and other pretenders to a theory of quantum gravity. It has also led to speculations that we live in a holographic universe, in which three-dimensional space is some kind of illusion.
Andrew Strominger, a Harvard string theorist, said of the holographic theory, “If it's really true, it's a deep and beautiful property of our universe — but not an obvious one.”Dr. Hawking in 1979. The only subject at University College, Oxford, that he found exciting was cosmology because it dealt with what he called “the big question: Where did the universe come from?” — Photograph: Santi Visalli/Getty Images.To ‘Know the Mind of God’The discovery of black hole radiation also led to a 30-year controversy over the fate of things that had fallen into a black hole.
Dr. Hawking initially said that detailed information about whatever had fallen in would be lost forever because the particles coming out would be completely random, erasing whatever patterns had been present when they first fell in. Paraphrasing Einstein's complaint about the randomness inherent in quantum mechanics, Dr. Hawking said, “God not only plays dice with the universe, but sometimes throws them where they can't be seen.”
Many particle physicists protested that this violated a tenet of quantum physics, which says that knowledge is always preserved and can be retrieved. Leonard Susskind, a Stanford physicist who carried on the argument for decades, said, “Stephen correctly understood that if this was true, it would lead to the downfall of much of 20th-century physics.”
On another occasion, he characterized Dr. Hawking to his face as “one of the most obstinate people in the world; no, he is the most infuriating person in the universe.” Dr. Hawking grinned.
Dr. Hawking admitted defeat in 2004. Whatever information goes into a black hole will come back out when it explodes. One consequence, he noted sadly, was that one could not use black holes to escape to another universe. “I'm sorry to disappoint science fiction fans,” he said.
Despite his concession, however, the information paradox, as it is known, has become one of the hottest and deepest topics in theoretical physics. Physicists say they still do not know how information gets in or out of black holes.
Raphael Bousso of the University of California, Berkeley, and a former student of Dr. Hawking's, said the present debate had raised “by another few notches” his estimation of the “stupendous magnitude” of Dr. Hawking's original discovery.
In 1974, Dr. Hawking was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, the world's oldest scientific organization; in 1979, he was appointed to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge, a post once held by Isaac Newton. “They say it's Newton's chair, but obviously it's been changed,” he liked to quip.
Dr. Hawking also made yearly visits to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, which became like a second home. In 2008, he joined the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, as a visiting researcher.
Having conquered black holes, Dr. Hawking set his sights on the origin of the universe and on eliminating that pesky singularity at the beginning of time from models of cosmology. If the laws of physics could break down there, they could break down everywhere.
In a meeting at the Vatican in 1982, he suggested that in the final theory there should be no place or time when the laws broke down, even at the beginning. He called the notion the “no boundary” proposal.
With James Hartle of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, Dr. Hawking envisioned the history of the universe as a sphere like the Earth. Cosmic time corresponds to latitude, starting with zero at the North Pole and progressing southward.
Although time started there, the North Pole was nothing special; the same laws applied there as everywhere else. Asking what happened before the Big Bang, Dr. Hawking said, was like asking what was a mile north of the North Pole — it was not any place, or any time.
By then string theory, which claimed finally to explain both gravity and the other forces and particles of nature as tiny microscopically vibrating strings, like notes on a violin, was the leading candidate for a “theory of everything.”Dr. Hawking married Elaine Mason in 1995. — Photograph: Lynne Sladky/Associated Press.In “A Brief History of Time”, Dr. Hawking concluded that “if we do discover a complete theory” of the universe, “it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists.”
He added, “Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of why it is that we and the universe exist.”
“If we find the answer to that,” he continued, “it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we would know the mind of God.”
Until 1974, Dr. Hawking was still able to feed himself and to get in and out of bed. At Jane's insistence, he would drag himself, hand over hand, up the stairs to the bedroom in his Cambridge home every night, in an effort to preserve his remaining muscle tone. After 1980, care was supplemented by nurses.
Dr. Hawking retained some control over his speech up to 1985. But on a trip to Switzerland, he came down with pneumonia. The doctors asked Jane if she wanted his life support turned off, but she said no. To save his life, doctors inserted a breathing tube. He survived, but his voice was permanently silenced.Speaking With the EyesIt appeared for a time that he would be able to communicate only by pointing at individual letters on an alphabet board. But when a computer expert, Walter Woltosz, heard about Dr. Hawking's condition, he offered him a program he had written called Equalizer. By clicking a switch with his still-functioning fingers, Dr. Hawking was able to browse through menus that contained all the letters and more than 2,500 words.
Word by word — and when necessary, letter by letter — he could build up sentences on the computer screen and send them to a speech synthesizer that vocalized for him. The entire apparatus was fitted to his motorized wheelchair.
Even when too weak to move a finger, he communicated through the computer by way of an infrared beam, which he activated by twitching his right cheek or blinking his eye. The system was expanded to allow him to open and close the doors in his office and to use the telephone and internet without aid.
Although he averaged fewer than 15 words per minute, Dr. Hawking found he could speak through the computer better than he had before losing his voice. His only complaint, he confided, was that the speech synthesizer, manufactured in California, had given him an American accent.
His decision to write “A Brief History of Time” was prompted, he said, by a desire to share his excitement about “the discoveries that have been made about the universe” with “the public that paid for the research.” He wanted to make the ideas so accessible that the book would be sold in airports.
He also hoped to earn enough money to pay for his children's education. He did. The book's extraordinary success made him wealthy, a hero to disabled people everywhere and even more famous.
The news media followed his movements and activities over the years, from visiting the White House to meeting the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, and reported his opinions on everything from national health care (socialized medicine in England had kept him alive) to communicating with extraterrestrials (maybe not a good idea, he said), as if he were a rolling Delphic Oracle.
Asked by New Scientist magazine what he thought about most, Dr. Hawking answered: “Women. They are a complete mystery.”Dr. Hawking saw space exploration as essential to the long-term survival of the human race. “Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global nuclear war,” he said in 2007. — Photograph: David Silverman/Getty Images.In 1990, Dr. Hawking and his wife separated after 25 years of marriage; Jane Hawking wrote about their years together in two books, “Music to Move the Stars: A Life With Stephen Hawking” and “Traveling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen”. The latter became the basis of the 2014 movie “The Theory of Everything”.
In 1995, he married Elaine Mason, a nurse who had cared for him since his bout of pneumonia. She had been married to David Mason, the engineer who had attached Dr. Hawking's speech synthesizer to his wheelchair.
In 2004, British newspapers reported that the Cambridge police were investigating allegations that Elaine had abused Dr. Hawking, but no charges were filed, and Dr. Hawking denied the accusations. They later divorced in 2006.
His survivors include his children, Robert, Lucy and Tim, and three grandchildren. His children released the following statement:‘There Is No Heaven’Among his many honors, Dr. Hawking was named a commander of the British Empire in 1982. In the summer of 2012, he had a star role in the opening of the Paralympics Games in London. The only thing lacking was the Nobel Prize, and his explanation for this was characteristically pithy: “The Nobel is given only for theoretical work that has been confirmed by observation. It is very, very difficult to observe the things I have worked on.”
Dr. Hawking was a strong advocate of space exploration, saying it was essential to the long-term survival of the human race. “Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of,” he told an audience in Hong Kong in 2007.
Nothing raised as much furor, however, as his increasingly scathing remarks about religion. One attraction of the no-boundary proposal for Dr. Hawking was that there was no need to appeal to anything outside the universe, like God, to explain how it began.
In “A Brief History of Time” he had referred to the “mind of God,” but in “The Grand Design”, a 2011 book he wrote with Leonard Mlodinow, he was more bleak about religion. “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper,” he wrote, referring to the British term for a firecracker fuse, “and set the universe going.”
He went further in an interview that year in The Guardian, saying: “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”
Having spent the best part of his life grappling with black holes and cosmic doom, Dr. Hawking had no fear of the dark.
“They're named black holes because they are related to human fears of being destroyed or gobbled up,” he once told an interviewer. “I don't have fears of being thrown into them. I understand them. I feel in a sense that I am their master.”__________________________________________________________________________ • Matthew Haag, Matt Stevens and Gerald Jonas contributed reporting to this obituary.• Dennis Overbye's reporting can range from zero-gravity fashion shows and science in the movies to the status of Pluto, the death of the Earth and the fate of the universe. He joined The New York Times in 1998 as deputy science editor, resuming a newspaper career that had been disrupted in the ninth grade when he lost his job as editor of the junior high paper after being in a classroom after hours where erasers were thrown. In the meantime, he graduated from M.I.T. with a physics degree, failed to finish a novel and worked as a writer and editor at Sky and Telescope and Discover magazines. He has written two books: “Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, The Scientific Search for the Secret of the Universe” (HarperCollins 1991, and Little, Brown, 1999), and “Einstein in Love, A Scientific Romance” (Viking, 2000). As a result of the latter, there are few occasions for which he cannot rustle up a quotation — appropriate or not — from Albert Einstein. In 2001, realizing that the reporters were having more fun and got to take cooler trips than editors, he switched to being a reporter. He has been covering the universe for more than 30 years, but lately he professes to be amazed that a huge chunk of his work is devoted to two topics that did not exist only a decade or so ago: the proliferation of planets beyond our own solar system; and the mysterious dark energy that seems to be souping up the expansion of the universe and spurring metaphysical-sounding debates among astronomers and physicists. He lives with his wife, Nancy, and daughter, Mira, in Morningside Heights. In their house, he reports, Pluto is still a planet. __________________________________________________________________________ Related to this topic: • New York Times topic: Stephen W. Hawking • SLIDE SHOW: The Expansive Life of Stephen HAWKING • VIDEO: Stephen Hawking, Pop Culture Icon • VIDEO: Directing ‘The Theory of Everything’ • 6 Memorable Cultural Moments Inspired by Stephen Hawking • Stephen Hawking, in His Own Words • An Earthling's Guide to Black Holes • Stephen Hawking speaks: Life and the Cosmos, Word by Painstaking Word • Scientist at Work: Stephen W. Hawking; Sailing A Wheelchair To the End Of Timewww.nytimes.com/2018/03/14/obituaries/stephen-hawking-dead.html
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Post by Deleted on Apr 24, 2018 11:08:29 GMT 10
Another one bites the dust...
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Post by KTJ on Apr 24, 2018 11:15:34 GMT 10
George H.W. Bush might be next.
He's in intensive care, only a day or so after the funeral of his wife, Barbara Bush.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 24, 2018 19:15:49 GMT 10
They have been together for a long time, and in a long partnership when one dies often the other soon follows, its like a long term partner gives the spark to the other to get up in the morn.
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Post by Yassir Rebob on Apr 24, 2018 19:57:29 GMT 10
George H.W. Bush might be next. He's in intensive care, only a day or so after the funeral of his wife, Barbara Bush. Bit to early to start dancing on graves, do you not think, you sad, sad piece of work ?
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Post by KTJ on Apr 25, 2018 8:37:37 GMT 10
George H.W. Bush might be next. He's in intensive care, only a day or so after the funeral of his wife, Barbara Bush. Bit to early to start dancing on graves, do you not think, you sad, sad piece of work ? Whose grave was I dancing on? I merely made a comment about George H.W. Bush being in intensive care, and that he might be next. Haven't you ever noticed that when a long-term spouse dies, the surviving spouse often dies not long afterwards? That's what happened with my parents, who had been married for more than 61 years. Mind you, I'd joyfully dance on the grave of that despotic terrorist leader Benjamin Netanyahu if he karked it and I happened to be anywhere near his grave.
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Post by KTJ on Apr 25, 2018 14:48:08 GMT 10
from The New York Times....With George H.W. Bush Hospitalized, the World Wonders: Is It a Broken Heart?Failing health after sudden grief — especially the loss of a spouse — has been reported by medical researchers. But it seems to be statistically quite rare, experts said.By GINA KOLATA and BENEDICT CAREY | 7:44PM EDT — Tuesday, April 24, 2018The Bushes were married for 73 years. — Photograph: Matthew Cavanaugh/European Pressphoto Agency/Shutterstock.WAS IT a broken heart that landed George H.W. Bush, the 41st president, in the hospital just a day after the funeral of his wife, Barbara?
The Bushes were married for 73 years — they were allies, confidantes and the anchors of a political dynasty. On Tuesday, speculation swirled that Mrs. Bush's death must have sent him into a downward medical spiral.
Failing health that accompanies grieving, especially the loss of a spouse, has been reported by some medical researchers. But if the link exists at all — and many experts believe it doesn't — it seems to be quite rare.
The idea “appeals to our romanticism,” said Donald Berry, a statistician at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
“The phenomenon is due largely to selective memory,” he added. “We all know examples where husband and wife die within a week of each other. They stick in our minds — we remember them.”
Mr. Bush reportedly had an infection that flared dangerously, and he is quite frail, Dr. Berry and other experts noted. Any number of factors could have contributed to his hospitalization.
That is not to say that deep grief on rare occasions can't send the body into free fall. The best known of these reactions, and a model for understanding them, is what's aptly called broken-heart syndrome.
Japanese doctors were the first to describe the reaction in detail, and their name for it was even more evocative: Takotsubo syndrome, after the Japanese term for “octopus trap.” On scans of the grief-stricken, the heart may look as if it being squeezed from below, its upper chambers swelling as if straining to break free.
The sudden loss of a spouse, child or parent “releases an outpouring from the sympathetic nervous system, the fight-or-flight response, which is what seems to damage the heart in broken-heart syndrome,” said Dr. Anne Curtis, chairwoman of medicine at the University at Buffalo.
“The heart rate goes up sharply, blood pressure goes up,” she said. “This is why people can also have a stroke in situations like this.”
The octopus trap can ensnare any heart, healthy or not, young or old. The flash-flood of stress hormones causes a temporary weakening of the heart muscle itself. The rush may also precipitate a classic heart attack, in which a clot blocks blood flow, or an arrhythmia, in which the heart revs wildly. The latter two consequences are more rare than the first, and deadlier.
Dr. Curtis estimated that about one percent of perceived heart attacks are due to broken-heart syndrome or similar surges of stressful emotion. “We tell people that many will return to normal or near-normal heart function,” she said.George H.W. Bush with his daughter Dorothy Bush Koch, at a visitation for his wife, Barbara Bush, on Friday in Houston. — Photograph: Mark Burns/Pool Photo.In the first major American study of the phenomenon, doctors at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine studied 18 women and one man who landed in coronary care with chest pains and no classic signs of cardiac arrest after traumatic events, including the death of a spouse. Most were middle-aged and older, but two were young adults. All 19 survived.
Since that research appeared, thousands of cases have been reported. About 90 percent of them are middle-aged women or older, said Dr. Ilan Wittstein, who led the original study.
One possible reason is that levels of estrogen, which protect smaller vessels in the heart, drop with age. “Still, 10 percent are men, so this is something that can happen to anyone,” Dr. Wittstein said.
If what felled Mr. Bush was a worsening infection, as reported, then a tide of grief in theory could have worsened his condition. Studies have linked elevated levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, to increased risk of contracting flu, colds and other sicknesses.
“A lot of things happen when people are overcome with sadness — neuroendocrine changes, which include an increase in cortisol levels, can suppress immune response,” Dr. Wittstein said.
Yet tracing a straight line between the death of a spouse and the subsequent physical decline of a survivor is no easy task. Cause and effect are difficult to prove.
That ailing spouses in their early 90s might die within a short time of each other is quite possible even if there were no such thing as broken-heart syndrome, simply because of their age and health, Bradley Efron, a statistician at Stanford University, said in an email.
And signs of broken-heart syndrome rarely have been documented in large groups of people. In a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers reviewed 30,447 people aged 60 to 89 in Britain whose partners had died. The subjects were compared to 83,588 people of the same ages whose partners had not died.
Those who were bereaved had a greater risk of a coronary event in the month after their partners died. But the increase in risk was tiny: Fifty in the bereaved group (0.16 percent) had a heart attack or stroke, compared to 67 (0.08 percent) in the comparison group.
Still, the rare examples capture our attention, as Dr. Berry noted.
The actress Debbie Reynolds died one day after her beloved daughter Carrie Fisher. Quarterback Doug Flutie's parents died on the same day, both of heart attacks. Johnny and June Cash died within months of each other, after a long marriage.
Somehow we lose sight of the norm. As Brian Skyrms, a professor of philosophy of science and economics at the University of California, Irvine, noted: “Nursing homes are full of surviving spouses.”__________________________________________________________________________ • This story appears in the Wednesday, April 25, 2018 print edition of The New York Times. • Gina Kolata is a reporter at The New York Times, focusing on science and medicine. Her training is in science: She studied molecular biology on the graduate level at M.I.T. for a year and a half and has a master's degree in applied mathematics from the University of Maryland. Her work at The N.Y. Times has led her to be a Pulitzer finalist twice — for investigative reporting in 2000 and for explanatory journalism in 2010. Other writing awards include ones in 2010 from the Silurian Society for a series on the war on cancer and from the Associated Press Sports Editors for writing about the Caster Semenya intersex controversy at the world track championships. In previous years she has received awards from other groups, including the American Association of Health Care Journalists, and the University of Maryland, which gave her a Distinguished Alumnus award. Bowdoin College awarded her an honorary doctoral degree. And she was made a Kentucky Colonel, just like Colonel Sanders. She is the author of six books, the most recent of which is “Mercies in Disguise: A Story of Hope, a Family's Genetic Destiny, and The Science That Saved Them”. She has also lectured at various universities and medical schools. Besides working for The New York Times, her passions include spending time with her family, reading literary fiction, distance running, road cycling, cooking and knitting. • Benedict Carey has been a science reporter for The New York Times since 2004. Previously, he was a health and medical writer for the Los Angeles Times from 2000 to 2004. Mr. Carey had been a freelance journalist since 1997, and before that a staff writer for Health Magazine. He has written three books, “How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens” (Random House, 2014) about the cognitive science of learning; “Poison Most Vial” (2011, Abrams) and “Island of the Unknowns” (2009, Abrams), science mysteries for middle schoolers. Mr. Carey graduated from the University of Colorado with a mathematics degree in 1983. In 1985 he completed a one-year journalism program at Northwestern University. www.nytimes.com/2018/04/24/health/george-barbara-bush-grief-health.html
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Post by KTJ on May 16, 2018 13:06:50 GMT 10
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Post by Occam's Spork on May 16, 2018 13:31:23 GMT 10
Did he die or is it just a theory...?? He lives, but in an alternate reality.
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