Month: November 2017

Mel Tillis, the affable longtime country star who wrote hits for Kenny Rogers, Ricky Skaggs and many others, and overcame a stutter to sing on dozens of his own singles, has died.

A spokesman for Tillis, Don Murry Grubbs, said Tillis died early Sunday at Munroe Regional Medical Center in Ocala, Florida. He was 85.

Grubbs said Tillis battled intestinal issues since 2016 and never fully recovered.  The suspected cause of death is respiratory failure.

Tillis, the father of country singer Pam Tillis, recorded more than 60 albums and had more than 30 top 10 country singles, including  “Good Woman Blues,”  “Coca Cola Cowboy” and “Southern Rain.” Among the hits he wrote for others were “Detroit City” for Bobby Bare; “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” by Rogers and the First Edition; and “Thoughts of a Fool” for George Strait.

Country music stars Charlie Daniels, Crystal Gayle and Blake Shelton offered their condolences on Twitter.

“He once spent an entire day at his place in Tennessee showing me all the memorabilia he’d gathered over the years where he gave me a pair of his stage boots,” Shelton’s account said.  “He even took time to talk me through some hard times in my life on a couple phone calls.”

Although his early efforts to get a record deal were rebuffed because of his stutter, he was a promising songwriter in Nashville in the 1950s and 1960s, writing tunes for Webb Pierce and Ray Price.

In all, the Country Music Hall of Fame member wrote more than 1,000 songs and in 2012 received a National Medal of Arts for bringing “his unique blend of warmth and humor to the great tradition of country music.”

He also dabbled in acting, appearing in such feature films as Clint Eastwood’s “Every Which Way But Loose,” and the Burt Reynolds movies “Cannonball Run I and II” and “Smokey and the Bandit II.”  He starred in several television movies and briefly had a network TV show, “Mel and Susan Together,” with Susan Anton.

In 2007, Tillis became a regular performer on the Grand Ole Opry country music show.

“You know what?  Another part of the dream has been fulfilled,” he said at the time. “It’s been a long, hard road.”

Tillis was raised in Pahokee, Florida, and developed his stutter as a child while being treated for malaria.  He dropped out of the University of Florida and instead served in the Air Force and worked on the railroad before relocating to Nashville in 1957.

Musical from an early age, he started performing in the early 1950s with a group called The Westerners, while stationed in Okinawa and serving as a baker in the Air Force.

He held a variety of odd jobs before breaking out, including being a truck driver, a strawberry picker, a firefighter on the railroad and milkman, which inspired his breakthrough song.  Feeling down one day he began singing to himself, “Oh Lord, I’m tired.  Tired of living this ol’ way.”  He turned his lament into “I’m Tired,” which became a hit for Webb Pierce.

Price, Skaggs, Brenda Lee and hundreds of others would cover his songs.

Tillis, meanwhile, became a major success on his own in the late 1960s and toured for decades, often using his stutter as a source of humor – though his stutter disappeared when he sang.

“One of the reasons I worked it into my show is that it’s my trademark,” he once told The Associated Press.

He said that when he was in the Air Force as a flight leader, he marched airmen right into a wall.

“I couldn’t get out the word `halt,” he said.

Grubbs says the Tillis family will release information about funeral services in Florida and Nashville.
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When Britain’s 21-year-old Princess Elizabeth married 26-year-old Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten at Westminster Abbey in 1947, the wedding sparked joy and celebration in a country just recovering from World War II. 

Seven decades on, the couple who would become Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, both now in their 90s, are still going strong, their marriage a bedrock in British public life amid a world of change.

On Monday, they mark their 70th wedding anniversary, though officials say the milestone will be celebrated privately and no public events are planned. The royal family is reportedly marking the date with a gathering at Windsor Castle. 

The queen is the first monarch in British history to celebrate a platinum wedding anniversary. 

At their 50th wedding anniversary, Elizabeth praised her husband as “quite simply… my strength and stay all these years.”

Elizabeth first met Philip, a naval officer and the son of Prince Andrew of Greece, as they attended the wedding of Philip’s cousin in 1934. 

The pair wed at Westminster Abbey in London on Nov. 20, 1947. It would be nearly another six years before Elizabeth would be crowned as monarch, also at Westminster Abbey. 

In the decades that followed, Philip, who also holds the title Duke of Edinburgh, spent almost the entire duration of their marriage supporting his wife in her role as head of state. Both have cut back on their public engagements in recent years, and Philip retired from official duties earlier this year. 

The royal couple has four children, eight grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
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Afghanistan defeated Pakistan Sunday, winning their first under-19 cricket Asia Cup final in Kuala Lumpur, offering a rare opportunity for celebrations in a country desperate for a break from relentless rounds of deadly violence.

Batting first, the Afghan team scored 248 runs in their allotted 50 overs. The opposition Pakistani side while chasing the target was dismissed within 23 overs for just 63 runs, enabling Afghans to win the match by a massive margin of 185 runs to lift the championship trophy.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani tweeted his pride in the team, posting to his official Twitter account: “Indeed, our young colts showed that our future in cricket is bright.”

And Afghanistan Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah tweeted, though he is out of Afghanistan on an official trip, “I feel proud to congratulate our nation on this very unique, rare and prideful occasion of our country’s cricket as Afghanistan’s U19 clinches historic win over Pakistan at the ACC U-19 Asia Cup and lifts the trophy for the first time in the history.”

The win demonstrated significant improvement in Afghan cricket, which spread in the war-torn country from refugee camps in neighboring Pakistan and has become one of Afghanistan’s most popular sports in recent years.

The International Cricket Council in this year inducted Afghanistan as its 12th full member, recognizing the strides the Afghan national side has made in the game.

The other full ICC members, are traditional cricket-playing nations: England, Australia, Bangladesh, South Africa, New Zealand, Pakistan, the West Indies, India, Ireland, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe.
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A group dedicated to preserving and promoting the Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail has purchased private land in western Washington state to prevent a break in the path.

The Pacific Crest Trail Association bought more than 400 acres (162 hectares) in the Stevens Pass area this week from a private landowner for $1.6 million, The Seattle Times reported.

The association says the landowner had considered putting up a fence and cutting off public access to the trail.

“Given the topography, we found it very difficult to loop around that piece of private property,” said Megan Wargo, the group’s director of land protection. “There’s only a short window you can be out there building trail. It would have meant several years of access to the PCT as a through-hike would have been closed.”

The 2,600-mile (4,200-kilometer) trail from Mexico to Canada generally follows the crests of several mountain ranges, including the Cascades in Washington state and Oregon.

Wargo said the U.S. Forest Service manages the trail and has easements where it crosses private land. However, no one got an easement for the private land on the section of trail at the Stevens Pass Trailhead, she said.

“In most likelihood, it was just an oversight,” Wargo said. “Somebody thought there was an easement there, but the easement was not recorded.”

In 2015, the property owner was looking to sell and fence off the trail, so the association borrowed money to buy the land. It says the next step is to sell the land to the Forest Service at market value so it can repay the loan.
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Malcolm Young, the co-founder of rock band AC/DC, has died at the age of 64, according to a statement on the group’s website. 

Young created the Australian heavy metal band with his brother Angus Young in 1972.

He was the group’s guitar player until April 2014 when he took leave of the band. It was later announced he had been suffering with dementia, according to Rolling Stone magazine.

AC/DC was known for its bold guitar riffs and declarative, howling vocals, characterized by such songs as Back in Black and Highway to Hell.

“Today, it is with deep heartfelt sadness that AC/DC has to announce the passing of Malcolm Young,” a statement read on the band’s website.

“With enormous dedication and commitment, he was the driving force behind the band. As a guitarist, songwriter and visionary, he was a perfectionist and a unique man,” Angus Young said in a statement.

 
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In the weeks since dozens of women have accused movie mogul Harvey Weinstein of rape or sexual, unleashing an avalanche of similar charges against other prominent men across American life, women and men of color have been largely absent from the national furor.

The stories of abuse have roiled the entertainment industry, politics, tech and more, raising the possibility that this could be a watershed moment to end tolerance of such behavior. But some observers fear minority women may miss the moment, as they often are more reticent to speak up about sexual harassment.

“The stakes are higher in a lot of instances for us than they are for a lot of other women,” said Tarana Burke, a black activist who founded the #MeToo movement on Twitter in 2006 to raise awareness around sexual violence. “That creates a dynamic where you have women of color who have to think a little bit differently about what it means for them to come forward in cases of sexual harassment.”

A few high-profile minority actresses have come forward. New York authorities are investigating claims from actress Paz de la Huerta that Weinstein raped her twice in 2010; he has denied charges of non-consensual sex with any woman.

When Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o wrote in a New York Times op-ed last month that she had an unsettling encounter with the producer in 2011 at his home, Weinstein quickly denied doing anything inappropriate with Nyong’o, after days of silence following similar accusations by famous white accusers.

Author and activist Feminista Jones said that Weinstein’s denial of Nyong’o’s allegations sent the message to black women that they can’t be harassed, they can’t be assaulted.”

For black women, that is a message that dates back to slavery, when black women’s bodies were not their own and racist stereotypes were used to justify abuse, said Rutgers University historian Deborah Gray White.

“Historically, African-American women have been perceived as promiscuous,” said White, author of the book, “Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South.”

“Black women’s bodies, from Day One, have been available to all men,” she said.

As a result, White said, black women have had a hard time proving sexual exploitation. In response, many chose to remain silent as a form of self-preservation.

“Somehow talking about it is admitting , ’I walk the land unprotected,’” White said. “They were damned if they did and damned if they didn’t.”

For Asian-American women, speaking up after sexual assault can be daunting for a variety of cultural reasons, said Anna Bang, education coordinator at KAN-WIN, a Chicago-based domestic violence and sexual assault services group that frequently helps Asian-American and immigrant women. Bang said she has noticed the absence of Asian-American women from the Weinstein conversation and, as a Korean immigrant, doubts that she would tell her family if she were ever assaulted.

“It’s such a shame and guilt,” she said. “You don’t want your parents to be worried about you … When we are growing up, your parents teach you, ‘Don’t share your family problems with people.’ We’re trying to break that silence by educating our community members.”

Many of the women who seek help from KAN-WIN do so a decade or more after the abuse took place, she said.

“In our culture, women … they teach you how to suck it up,” she said. “They teach you to swallow your anger, your fear. It’s tough.”

Women of Latin American descent also weigh economic and cultural issues when deciding whether to speak out about sexual abuse.

Women of Latin American descent have been stereotyped as being submissive and sexually available, according to Monica Russel y Rodriguez, a Northwestern University ethnographer whose research includes sexuality, race and class in Latino communities. She said that undocumented immigrants in the United States would be even less likely to report an assault or harassment, fearing anything from job loss to blackmail or deportation.

“Even for white women, there’s not going to be any guarantee of an equitable resolution, so it’s a lot to expect women in a more highly vulnerable situation to be willing to speak out at the same rate,” Russel y Rodriguez said. “There’s no reason to expect that Latinas aren’t being sexually harassed or raped at the same degree or more.”

While most of the recent spate of sexual abuse allegations have been against white men, men of color have not been immune to such charges. Before the Weinstein scandal upended Hollywood, Bill Cosby’s name became synonymous with sexual abuse, as more than 50 women came forward and said the pioneering black actor once known as “America’s Dad” forced sexual contact with them over decades. Last June, Cosby went to trial on charges that he drugged and molested a woman in 2004. The case ended in a mistrial and Cosby is expected to be retried next year.

Since the Weinstein scandal, a writer for The Root, a website geared toward the black audience, said both Jesse Jackson and John Singleton sexually harassed her. Jackson and Singleton declined comment when contacted by The Associated Press, as did the Root writer.

George Takei, best known for his role in the original “Star Trek,” was recently accused of groping a man decades earlier; he denied the allegations. Actor Terry Crews went public with a claim that a Hollywood agent groped him, and that agent was later fired.

And an actress, Demi Mann, filed a lawsuit Thursday in which she alleged agent Cameron Mitchell sexually assaulted her. Mitchell, who is black, was fired by Creative Arts Agency, LLC.; he called Mann’s claims false.

But compared to the dozens of well-known white men named and white women who have made allegations, people of color have not played a prominent role in this evolving scandal.

Nearly three decades ago, an African-American attorney started the conversation on the topic. Anita Hill detailed allegations of sexual harassment by her former boss, then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, during the 1991 congressional hearings held ahead of his confirmation. Thomas, also African-American, framed the hearings as a “high-tech lynching” and went on to be confirmed to the high court.

Hill was treated as a pariah by some for coming forward, but she was hailed by others and has spent the decades since as an advocate for women’s equality.

Burke, whose online #MeToo campaign was resurrected by actress Alyssa Milano in the wake of the Weinstein charges, doesn’t want minority women to miss the moment. She is launching a series of webinars to help women understand sexual violence and is encouraging women of color around the world to speak out.

“At some point, we have to confront this as a community,” Burke said. “This is a great place for this to happen.”
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Naim Suleymanoglu, the Turkish weightlifter who won three Olympic gold medals and was known as “Pocket Hercules,” died Saturday. He was 50.

Suleymanoglu was considered one of the sport’s greatest athletes and earned his nickname for his strength and diminutive size. He died at an Istanbul hospital where he was receiving treatment for cirrhosis of the liver. He had been in intensive care since Sept. 28 and received a liver transplant in October, according to Turkey’s official Anadolu news agency.

The weightlifter – 1.47 meters (4-foot-10) tall – won three straight Olympic gold medals for Turkey between 1988 and 1996. The Bulgarian-born Suleymanoglu could lift three times his weight.

He came out of retirement to try for a fourth gold at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 but missed all three of his lifts.

“I know only gold,” Suleymanoglu had said as he returned to competition. “I do not know about silver or bronze.”

Suleymanoglu also won seven world and six European championships.

He was born to an ethnic Turkish family in Bulgaria, and defected to Turkey in 1986 while training in Australia.

Regarded as a national hero in his adopted country, Suleymanoglu captured the hearts of Turks after winning his first gold at Seoul, South Korea, in 1988. Whenever Suleymanoglu returned home from a tournament, he would be greeted by thousands of fans who would lift him up on their shoulders.

Suleymanoglu missed the 1984 Games at Los Angeles because of a Soviet-led boycott. Although only 17, he was the favorite to win the bantamweight gold.

He was an outspoken critic of the Bulgarian government’s treatment of the Turkish minority in his homeland, and was forced by the authorities to change his surname to the more Slavic-sounding Shalamanov.

When the Bulgarian weightlifting team went to a training camp at Melbourne, Australia, in 1986, he slipped away from the group while pretending to visit the restroom at a hotel.

Suleymanoglu hid in Australia for several days before he went to the Turkish consulate to seek asylum. Eventually the Bulgarians allowed him to switch nationalities and he kissed the airport tarmac on arrival in Turkey. In 1986 he changed his name to the more Turkic-sounding Suleymanoglu.

He went to the Seoul Olympics as a Turk and twice broke the world record in the snatch on the way to winning the gold medal.

He competed unsuccessfully for a seat in Turkish parliamentary elections in 1999 and 2007.
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