NY Congressman Weiner Resigns

By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ NY TIMES

Representative Anthony D. Weiner, a once-promising politician whose Brooklyn roots and scrappy style made him a leading candidate to be the next mayor of New York, resigned his seat on Thursday, ending a three-week scandal over his lewd online behavior that startled his constituents and alienated many of his colleagues.

Mr. Weiner made the decision after long and emotional discussions with his political advisers and his wife, Huma Abedin, whom friends described as devastated by the behavior of her husband of 11 months, and worried about the couple’s financial future.

In a chaotic four-minute news conference at a senior center in his district, Mr. Weiner, 46, strained to be heard as a small group of hecklers hollered vulgar questions at him and called him a “pervert” while puzzled elderly constituents looked on.

“I am here today to again apologize for the personal mistakes I have made and the embarrassment I have caused,” Mr. Weiner said.

A seven-term Democrat, Mr. Weiner had hoped his declaration last weekend that he would seek mental health treatment and take a temporary leave from Congress would ease the pressure from Democratic leaders for him to step down. But their demands only grew louder as revelations about his conduct continued.

“I am announcing my resignation from Congress, so my colleagues can get back to work, my neighbors can choose a new representative and most important so that my wife and I can continue to heal from the damage I have caused,” Mr. Weiner said at the news conference.

Ms. Abedin was with Mr. Weiner at his Queens apartment as he prepared to make his statement, but did not appear at his side at the event.

The announcement brought swift relief to his Democratic colleagues, who had become increasingly uneasy as details emerged about Mr. Weiner’s online contacts with women — including his sending of explicit photos of himself to them over Facebook and Twitter. Democratic leaders had prepared to hold a meeting on Thursday to determine whether they should strip Mr. Weiner of his committee assignments, which would have severely impaired his effectiveness.

Mr. Weiner reached his decision late Wednesday, and seemed at peace with it, after days of appearing frazzled and torn, a person who spoke to him said. He began telling his most trusted advisers on Wednesday night, then held a conference call with his entire staff, informing them that it no longer seemed fair to his constituents and his colleagues for him to remain in office.

At about 8:45 p.m., he called Representative Steve Israel of New York, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who was attending a White House picnic on the South Lawn, alongside hundreds of lawmakers enjoying hamburgers and patriotic music from the United States Navy Band.

Mr. Israel, after hearing the news from Mr. Weiner, sought out Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, in the crowd and handed his cellphone to her so Mr. Weiner could tell her his plans himself.

Ms. Pelosi had taken an aggressive posture with regard to Mr. Weiner, including the rare step on Saturday of calling for him to leave the House. On Thursday morning, she released a statement saying he had “made the right judgment in resigning.”

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo must now call a special election to fill the vacancy created by Mr. Weiner’s departure. But the Ninth Congressional District, which covers Queens neighborhoods like Forest Hills and Howard Beach as well as Brooklyn sections like Midwood and Mill Basin, is a likely target for elimination as state lawmakers redraw district lines for 2012.

The scandal that upended Mr. Weiner’s career erupted late last month after a photograph of the congressman wearing tight-fitting underpants was sent to a college student in Washington State. Mr. Weiner initially denied having anything to do with it, saying his Twitter account had been hacked. But during an emotional news conference on June 6, he admitted that he had lied, and that he had in fact sent the image and had had inappropriate online exchanges with at least six other women.

As the story engulfed him, Mr. Weiner spoke regularly with advisers and Ms. Abedin, a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was traveling on a 10-day trip to North Africa and the Middle East.

The decision to step down was ultimately Mr. Weiner’s, but Ms. Abedin supported it, convinced that the embarrassing disclosures would not stop until he left office, according to friends who have spoken to her.

One of the friends described Ms. Abedin, who appeared composed and poised on the trip abroad, as devastated and shocked by Mr. Weiner’s behavior. But Ms. Abedin, who is pregnant, intends to stay with her husband, at least for now.

“I don’t think she has made a firm decision, but she is very loyal,” said the friend, who requested anonymity so as not to betray confidential conversations.

Neither Ms. Abedin nor Mr. Weiner earn lucrative salaries, and Ms. Abedin is worried about her husband, who has been in politics much of his adult life, finding work. Mr. Weiner would still be eligible to collect his pension after his resignation.

It was not clear what would happen to Mr. Weiner’s announced plans to enter a treatment center; on Thursday night, a spokeswoman, Risa Heller, had no comment.

But an Ethics Committee investigation opened by the House into his conduct is expected to end as a result of his resignation, because the committee has jurisdiction only over members of Congress. And Mr. Weiner will retain control of more than $4 million in his campaign account.

It has been a precipitous fall for Mr. Weiner, a media-savvy politician with a knack for identifying hot-button issues, who had been considered a leading candidate for mayor in 2013.

Mr. Weiner was first elected to Congress in 1998, capturing the seat that had been vacated by his political mentor, Charles E. Schumer, who won a seat in the United States Senate that year. Prior to entering Congress, Mr. Weiner was the youngest person ever elected to the City Council, where he served for eight years.

Despite his successes, Mr. Weiner could be abrasive, and some colleagues wrote him off as a publicity seeker unwilling to put in the hard work needed to pass serious legislation.

Still, even as the story about his online exploits dragged on, some constituents stayed loyal to him. Vicky Hodja, 53, came out to support Mr. Weiner, who always showed up at her children’s school to hand out awards for stellar attendance and good behavior.

She said Mr. Weiner’s wife was “very smart,” and urged her to ignore any suggestion that she leave her husband.

“If she wants to have a marriage and a life,” Ms. Hodja said, Ms. Abedin should consider modeling her behavior on that of her boss, Mrs. Clinton, who famously stood by President Bill Clinton during marital infidelities.

“Human beings make mistakes,” she said, “but they learn from their mistakes.”

Michael Barbaro, Matt Flegenheimer and Ashley Parker  contributed reporting.

Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor: Soldier, scholar and celebrated travel writer hailed as the best of his time

Artemis CooperIn Greece just after the Second World War, Patrick Leigh Fermor was on a lecture tour for the British Council.

The lecture was supposed to be on British culture, but he had been persuaded to talk about his wartime exploits on Crete. Leigh Fermor took sips from a large glass as he spoke and when it was nearly finished, he topped it up from a carafe of water. The liquid turned instantly cloudy: he had added water to a nearly empty tumbler of neat ouzo.

A roar of appreciation went up from the audience at this impromptu display of leventeia. A quality prized in Greece, leventeia indicates high spirits, humour, quickness of mind and action, charm, generosity, the love of living dangerously and a readiness for anything. Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor had leventeia in spades.

He was born in 1915, the second child and only son of Lewis Leigh Fermor and his wife, Aileen Taaffe Ambler. The family were based in Calcutta, where Lewis Fermor worked for the Geological Survey of India. Aileen went to England for the birth, but did not dare bring Leigh Fermor back to India as the First World War intensified. She entrusted her baby to the Martins, a couple she scarcely knew in the village of Road Weedon, Northamptonshire, and for the next four years "Paddy-Mike" was adored, indulged and allowed to run wild. When his mother and sister Vanessa came back to collect him in 1919, it was the end of an infant idyll that had, he admitted, "unfitted me for the faintest shadow of constraint."

Leigh Fermor saw little of his father but was devoted to his flamboyant mother, who wrote plays, played the piano and loved reading aloud. He learnt to read late but devoured the works of Sir Walter Scott before he was 10, awaking an addiction for history, heraldry and adventure. Yet he was not a success academically, perpetually in trouble, and expelled from almost every school he attended.

The King's School, Canterbury, might have been the exception, but he was often in trouble, and the final straw came when he was caught holding hands with the greengrocer's daughter. His last report complained that he was a "dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness", and a bad influence on the other boys.

His parents felt a career in the army was the only hope, but he gravitated to Bohemian London and a raffish group who introduced him to nightclubs, strong drink and modern poetry, and encouraged his ambition to be a writer – but he had nothing to write about. He was drifting in a fog of disappointment when the solution came: he would embark on a walk across Europe from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople.

He was 18 when he set off in 1932. With an allowance of £5 a month he slept in hostels, sheep-folds, monasteries, barns, people's sofas, and for a few luxurious months in castles and country houses in Hungary and Transylvania. He reached Constantinople on New Year's Day, 1935. He spent his 20th birthday on Mount Athos, and a month later took part in a Greek royalist cavalry charge against Venizelist rebels across the River Struma on a borrowed horse. He then made his way to Athens, where he met Princess Balasha Cantacuzène.

A Romanian painter with dark, exotic looks, Balasha was eight years older and recently divorced. That summer they lived in a watermill opposite the island of Poros, and in autumn they retreated to Balasha's family home in Romania. Baleni, in the Cantacuzene estates in Moldavia, was his refuge for three years. Here he made the first attempt to write up his notes from his trans-European journey. He did not like the results, but he did earn money by translating Constantine Rodocanachis's Ulysse fils d'Ulysse which as Forever Ulysses became a bestseller in America. When war was declared, Leigh Fermor decided to go home. "The farewells next day," he wrote, "were like marching orders out of paradise."

He had hoped to join the Irish Guards, but took the commission offered by the Intelligence Corps which gave him the opportunity to return to Greece. As a British Liaison Officer he followed the Greek army's early successes against the Italians on the Albanian border in late 1940. When the Germans invaded the following April, the British and Greek forces retreated southwards. Leigh Fermor escaped by caique to Crete, where he took part in the battle in May 1941 against German paratroopers; when the battle was lost he was evacuated to Egypt. He was sent back to occupied Crete in June 1942, as one of a handful of SOE officers who were helping the Cretan Resistance.

After the Italian surrender in August 1943 he was contacted by the Italian general Angelo Carta. Rather than co-operate with the Germans, Carta wanted to leave Crete. Leigh Fermor saw him safely to Egypt – a mission which sparked the idea of kidnapping a German general. Promoted to major, he returned from Cairo to Crete in February 1944. With his second-in-command, Capt William Stanley Moss, and a hand-picked team of resistance fighters, the ambush took place on 26 April, when General Heinrich Kreipe, commander of the Sebastopol Division, was pulled out of his car on his way to his villa.

The hardest part was not so much the capture but the getaway. The wireless broke down, German troops flooded the south coast, from where they had planned to rendezvous with a Royal Navy launch, and the General hurt his shoulder in a fall. The party spent two weeks in caves and sheepfolds in the White Mountains, making their way over the snowy ridges of Mount Ida to a more secluded evacuation point. German patrols kept up the pressure, and leaflets were dropped warning that anyone who gave aid and succour to the kidnappers could expect the most severe punishment. No one gave them away.

The success of the operation and the discomfiture of the occupiers gave the Cretans a tremendous boost: as one of them put it, "the horn-wearers won't dare look us in the eye!" William Stanley Moss's diary was made into a book, Ill Met by Moonlight (and later a film with Dirk Bogarde.) Leigh Fermor was awarded the DSO and remains a hero on Crete. But he never published an account of his own experiences on the island.

After the war, he became assistant director of the British Institute in Athens. A colleague recalled the songs and laughter emerging from his office, which was a magnet for Cretans looking for a job. His boss sent him on a lecture tour to get him out of the way, which proved a success and took him all round Greece. This was the first of many journeys taken with Joan Rayner, a tall, blonde intellectual he had first met in Cairo. Daughter of the first Viscount Monsell, who had been First Lord of the Admiralty in the 1930s, she was widely travelled and a talented photographer.

In October 1949, the couple set off for the French Antilles. Leigh Fermor had been commissioned to write captions for a book of photographs by his friend A Costa, but this developed into his first full-length book, The Traveller's Tree (1950). The reviews were generous in their praise and he was earmarked as a writer to watch.

He was now free to concentrate on Greece. Over the next few years he and Joan travelled all over the mainland and the archipelago, by boat and bus and mule and on foot, exploring a country that was still remote outside the main towns and where customs and traditions were observed as they had been for centuries.

Spells of travel would be broken by long stints of writing, translation and journalism. In 1953 came two small books. A series of articles on monasteries, written for the Cornhill Magazine, were collected in A Time to Keep Silence, while his only novel, The Violins of Saint Jacques, grew out of a chapter he was supposed to have written for a book called Memorable Balls. He translated the wartime memoirs of his friend George Psychoundakis, which appeared in 1955 as The Cretan Runner, and wrote for The Spectator and The Sunday Times.

Beyond an insatiable thirst for travel, wine and books, Leigh Fermor and Joan lived a frugal life. She had a small private income, and by living abroad for most of the year they avoided tax. Friends helped by lending houses where he could write; among the most important was a house in Normandy owned by Amy Smart, the Egyptian wife of the diplomat Sir Walter Smart, and that of the painter Nico Ghika on the island of Hydra. When they were in England, Joan would retire to her family home at Dumbleton in Worcestershire while Leigh Fermor headed for the bright lights.

His friends scooped him up into a round of celebrations and reunions and house parties, where Leigh Fermor revelled in company. Among them were brothers-in-arms like Xan Fielding and George Jellicoe, celebrated hostesses such as Annie Fleming, Deborah Devonshire and Diana Cooper, and writers and poets such as John Betjeman, Robin Fedden, Philip Toynbee, and later, Bruce Chatwin.

Writing, on the other hand, was hard and solitary. Though many of his set-piece descriptions were written at a gallop and barely changed, other passages involved months of work. He was acutely attuned to internal rhythms; the alteration of one word would set up a ripple effect demanding whole chapters to be rewritten. His friend and publisher, Jock Murray, was often in despair as every set of proofs came back covered in crossings-out and addenda.

It was not until 1958 that Murray published Mani, Leigh Fermor's first book on Greece. It shows the southern Peloponnese as it was before tourism – a land of rocks and dazzling light, blood feuds and deep superstition, where people still told tales of their struggles against the Turks and pirates. Its companion volume, Roumeli covers his travels from Macedonia to the Gulf of Corinth.

Leigh Fermor and Joan were keen to settle in Greece, and they were always on the look-out for the perfect patch of land. They found it in 1963, in the Mani, a little promontory near the village of Kardamyli, south of Kalamata. Surrounded by olive groves, it looked out to sea and had its own rocky beach. With the help of a local stonemason, Leigh Fermor and Joan set about building the house. The result was the perfect monastery-built-for-two, at the heart of which was a library described by John Betjeman as "one of the rooms of the world".

Leigh Fermor at last had a permanent home, all his books in one place and uninterrupted solitude. His next subject was the one he had waited half a lifetime to write – the story of his great walk to Constantinople. "Shanks's Europe", as he called it, was worth the wait. A Time of Gifts appeared in 1977, and Between the Woods and the Water, the second volume in a proposed trilogy, in 1986. Together they present a snapshot of old Europe just before the joint cataclysms of war and Communism swept them away for ever. Every paragraph reflects the loss of a way of life still linked to its soil and its history, while celebrating the joy and enthusiasm of a young man discovering the riches of a continent. The reviews hailed him as the best travel writer of his time – and reader reviews on Amazon show him being rediscovered.

Unfortunately, the clamour for him to finish the last volume ushered in an ice age of writer's block. In 1988 and 1990 he revisited his old haunts in Bulgaria and Romania, hoping to kick-start the creative process. Shocked by the all-obliterating change, he found his own memories fading. In an effort to get him over it Jock Murray commissioned another book about a journey to Peru, which appeared as Three Letters from the Andes (1991). He wrote articles, introductions, obituaries, reviews, and even translated a story by PG Wodehouse into Greek – but the pen-paralysis persisted. The two people he most relied on for moral support died: Murray in 1993, and his wife Joan 10 years later. Leigh Fermor was knighted on his 90th birthday, but his eyesight was beginning to deteriorate. He carried on writing in longhand for as long as he could, but the final volume of his trilogy remains unfinished.

He will be remembered by his friends as someone who lived and talked as well as he wrote, whose leventeia was irrepressible, his conversation unforgettable. He could launch into a monologue that turned into a one-man show, a verbal rollercoaster that ranged from the Pyrenees to the Carpathians or chased mythical beasts through primeval forests, tribal customs, Guatemalan bus tickets, German heraldry and Napoleonic uniforms – leaving the company breathless with laughter and exhilaration.

Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor, writer and soldier: born London 11 February 1915; OBE (military) 1943; DSO 1944; Kt 2004; married 1968 Hon Joan Eyres-Monsell (died 2003); died 10 June 2011.

Heightening The Republican Contradictions, Ctd

ANDREW SULLIVAN DAILY BEAST

The relationship between religion and politics is, to my mind, the central question of our time. As the false totalisms of the twentieth century - communism, fascism, Nazism - have been revealed as oppressive, murderous lies, insecure and inadequate human beings in need of totalist solutions to the human dilemma have returned to religion. But more accurately, they have returned to fundamentalism, because only fundamentalism, with its absolute certainty and literal precision and binding, unquestionable authority, can assuage the anxieties of a world dislocated from tradition, up-ended by capitalism, globalized to the point of cultural panic.

What we are seeing on the Republican right at the moment, it seems to me, is an extension of this response to anxiety. The new orthodoxy is fundamentalist Americanism. This is not regular American exceptionalism of the kind that the president adheres to: a belief that this miraculous new world has opened up vistas of democratic opportunity to the rest of the planet, that its inspired constitution has enabled stability and freedom in equal measure, that it played an indispensable role in keeping freedom alive during some dark, dark times, and that its core idea - government by, for and of the people - is universalist in nature. No, the Americanism now heard on the right is that America was uniquely founded on Christianity, that America is therefore a chosen instrument of divine Providence, and that this moral superiority is so profound that indicting America on any prudential, moral or political grounds is un-American or, if it comes from abroad, evil.

This is how a country with one of the least efficient healthcare systems in the world must retain it for fear of mass serfdom. This is how a country that has tortured prisoners, using the classic brainwashing techniques of totalitarian dictatorships, has actually done nothing but apply enhanced interrogation to terror suspects. This is how a country allowed the critical regulation of a free market to lapse, and then suffered the consequences not of capitalism but of risk-seeking cronyism and self-serving irresponsibility. This version of American exceptionalism is the one that sees a stimulus regarded by most economists as a no-brainer in the face of a potential depression as an assault on freedom. It is the one that sees a successful bail-out of the banks and auto-companies as a form of communism, that regards the integration of gay citizens into the civil order as demonic, that views any engagement with our foes as appeasement, even when it has been accompanied by a massive surge in the Afghan war and the killing of Osama bin Laden.

This ideology comes perilously close to arguing that something must be right because America does it, or has done it. It paradoxically removes the potential for moral improvement and reform by arguing that America was immaculately conceived, and that all that is required for its revival is what Sarah Palin calls a "fundamental restoration". The core moral narrative of the country - its founding on slavery and its bitter brutal internal conflict to achieve racial justice over the centuries - is simply ignored. This is what we are hearing from Santorum and Romney and Palin: American fundamentalism.

All of this is routine for authoritarian nationalist movements. What distinguishes this one is a co-optation of Christianity. But, of course, Christianity cannot be co-opted by nationalism. It is opposed to all such distinctions:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Yes, the Messiah came from a Chosen People, but in Christianity, Jesus's death and resurrection made the whole world that chosen people. At the Feast of the Ascension yesterday, we Catholics heard at Mass the words of Jesus from Matthew:

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.

And so the notion of America as a unique nation in the eyes of God is a Christian heresy. And the rest of the current Republican agenda is also, extremely hard to square with Christian orthodoxy. A reader writes:

Let us count the ways in which Republican doctrine contradicts Christian teachings:

1. Randian "me-first" capitalism & support for corporate interests (Jesus's disdain for wealth)

2. Attacks on the welfare state & Medicaid (Jesus's charity)

3. Support for torture and neoconservatism in the name of security (turn the other cheek)

4. The entire project of fusing the Christian religion with conservative politics in the first place (Render unto Caesar...)

And that is not even counting social issues like gay rights, where Republican Christianists privilege a narrow reading of the Old Testament (Leviticus) at the expense of the entire breadth of teaching in the New (Love).

This goes a little too far, I think. But let me tackle it one by one. 1. There is no question that Ayn Rand despised Christianity because of its insistence on catering to the other before oneself. In fact, Randianism is, apart from Nietzsche, one of the most brutal attacks on the Sermon on the Mount ever written. You can argue that maintaining prosperity is essential for fostering private charity, that compassion requires wealth to succeed, that the free market, which assumes selfishness, is simply an accommodation to the fallen world. And there are legitimate differences among Christians about the prudential manner in which one can achieve certain ends.

But the problem even here is that the ends themselves - the greater material enrichment of human beings - is anathema to the Jesus of the Gospels. His radicalism with respect to property is extreme: we should have nothing. Indeed, if we retain anything, we will not enter the Kingdom of God. Now look at Wall Street. Could anything be more alien to that message? Or the engine of economic growth: the desire to better ourselves materially. The structure of modern America is therefore anti-Christian. Its worship of wealth and fame as the greatest of all things - yes, Palin comes instantly to mind - is the antithesis of Christianity.

2. Christians can and must retain a debate about the means of economic justice. I find little to rejoice over when government penalizes the rich simply because they are rich, or when it controls so much of the economy it inhibits creativity and growth. And the point of Christianity is that it cannot be imposed but must be chosen. So forcing charity on others by punitive taxation is a contradiction in terms. Nonetheless, again, Jesus is very clear, and the Catholic Church adamant, that the first to be protected in any policy debate should be the poor. Protecting the vulnerable comes before enriching the talented in Christian theology. The notion that the extremely wealthy should sacrifice nothing for fiscal reform, while the very poor should sacrifice access to healthcare is simply anti-Christian.

3. Torture is, of course, an intrinsic evil, regardless what one calls it. The imposition by force of freedom for others is equally anathema. Force should only be used, in Christian just war theory, in defense against an imminent or ongoing attack. The Afghanistan war was therefore justified, although not when al Qaeda and the Taliban had been eradicated. The Iraq war? Not so much.

4. The apolitical nature of Christianity. It seems to me that one of the core messages of Jesus was that his kingdom was not of this world. Politics is a necessary evil, but it is not a spiritual vocation. Between a life in the world and a life that is otherworldly, it is hard to see Christianity in a political mode. By wresting it from its proper context, attaching it to a single nation-state, using it to defend public policies that are, at bottom, anathema to the priorities of the Gospels, Christianists are indeed not Christians.

The distinction's relevance has not merely endured. It becomes more and more pertinent by the day.

Former US secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger

who served under George Bush Sr in the early 1990s, died on Saturday at the age of 80,

He died in Charlottesville, Virginia, after a short illness, the spokeswoman said.

Eagleburger headed the state department from August 1992 to January 1993, capping a diplomatic career that spanned eight presidents, both Democrats and Republicans.

Barack Obama said Eagleburger had "helped our nation navigate the pivotal days during the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War".

Eagleburger entered the foreign service in 1957, but his career took off when he became an assistant to Richard Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, in 1969.

Self-described as a moderate Republican, Eagleburger was widely regarded as a tough pragmatist in foreign affairs.

After Republicans lost the White House to Jimmy Carter in 1976, Eagleburger was asked to stay on and served as ambassador to Yugoslavia in the Democratic administration.

He also served in the state department during the Reagan administration, leaving in 1984 to become president of Kissinger Associates, a consulting firm founded by Kissinger.

Bush brought him back to government in 1989 as deputy secretary of state, even though he had not been a member of Bush's inner circle of advisers.

Eagleburger became acting secretary when Baker left to run Bush's re-election campaign in August 1992 and was sworn in officially on 8 December 1992 for the last month-and-a-half of Bush's presidential term.

In 2006 Eagleburger was a late addition to the Iraq Study Group, that gave a report on the Iraq war to George W Bush.

An avuncular, cane-carrying figure who suffered from chronic asthma and a muscle disorder, Eagleburger was a heavy smoker, and known as crusty, charming and wisecracking.

He named each of his three sons Lawrence – but all with different middle names. Asked to explain that move he reportedly said: "First of all, it was ego. And secondly, I wanted to screw up the social security system."

Dr. Jack Kevorkian Dies at 83;

A Doctor Who Helped End Lives

By KEITH SCHNEIDER
Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the medical pathologist who willfully helped dozens of terminally ill people end their lives, becoming the central figure in a national drama surrounding assisted suicide, died on Friday in Royal Oak., Mich. He was 83.

He died at William Beaumont Hospital, where he had been admitted recently with kidney and respiratory problems, said Geoffrey N. Fieger, the lawyer who represented Dr. Kevorkian in several of his trials in the 1990s.

Mayer Morganroth, a friend and lawyer, told The Associated Press that the official cause of death would most likely be pulmonary thrombosis, a blood clot.

In arguing for the right of the terminally ill to choose how they die, Dr. Kevorkian challenged social taboos about disease and dying while defying prosecutors and the courts. He spent eight years in prison after being convicted of second-degree murder in the death of the last of about 130 ailing patients whose lives he had helped end, beginning in 1990.

Originally sentenced in 1999 to 10 to 25 years in a maximum security prison, he was released after assuring the authorities that he would never conduct another assisted suicide.

His critics were as impassioned as his supporters, but all generally agreed that his stubborn and often intemperate advocacy of assisted suicide helped spur the growth of hospice care in the United States and made many doctors more sympathetic to those in severe pain and more willing to prescribe medication to relieve it.

In Oregon, where a schoolteacher had become Dr. Kevorkian’s first assisted suicide patient, state lawmakers in 1997 approved a statute making it legal for doctors to prescribe lethal medications to help terminally ill patients end their lives. In 2006 the United States Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that found that Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act protected assisted suicide as a legitimate medical practice.

During the period that Oregon was considering its law, Dr. Kevorkian’s confrontational strategy gained wide publicity, which he actively sought. National magazines put his picture on their covers, and he drew the attention of television programs like “60 Minutes.” His nickname, Dr. Death, and his self-made suicide machine, which he variously called the “Mercitron” or the “Thanatron,” became fodder for late-night television comedians.

In 2010 his story was dramatized in the HBO movie “You Don’t Know Jack,” starring Al Pacino as Dr. Kevorkian. Mr. Pacino received Emmy and Golden Globe awards for his performance. In his Emmy acceptance speech, he said he had been gratified to “try to portray someone as brilliant and interesting and unique” as Dr. Kevorkian. Dr. Kevorkian, who was in the audience, smiled in appreciation.

Given his obdurate public persona and his delight in flaying medical critics as “hypocritical oafs,” Dr. Kevorkian invited and reveled in the public’s attention, regardless of its sting.

The American Medical Association in 1995 called him “a reckless instrument of death” who “poses a great threat to the public.”

Diane Coleman, the founder of Not Dead Yet, which describes itself as a disability-rights advocacy group and that once picketed Dr. Kevorkian’s home in Royal Oak, a Detroit suburb, attacked his approach. “It’s the ultimate form of discrimination to offer people with disabilities help to die,” she said, “without having offered real options to live.”

But Jack Lessenberry, a prominent Michigan journalist who covered Dr. Kevorkian’s one-man campaign, wrote in The Detroit Metro Times: “Jack Kevorkian, faults and all, was a major force for good in this society. He forced us to pay attention to one of the biggest elephants in society’s living room: the fact that today vast numbers of people are alive who would rather be dead, who have lives not worth living.”

In the late 1980s, after an undistinguished career in medicine and an unsuccessful try at a career in the arts, Dr. Kevorkian rediscovered a fascination with death that he had developed during his early years in medicine, only now his interest in it was not as a private event but as a matter of public policy.

As a student at the University of Michigan Medical School, from which he graduated in 1952, and later as a resident at the University of Michigan Medical Center, Dr. Kevorkian proposed giving murderers condemned to die the option of being executed with anesthesia in order to subject their bodies to medical experimentation and allow the harvesting of their healthy organs. He delivered a paper on the subject to a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1958.

Gaining Attention

In the 1960s and ’70s, Dr. Kevorkian shelved his quixotic campaign to engage death for social purposes and pursued a largely itinerant career as a medical pathologist. Though his friends described him as funny, witty, personable and engaging in private, those he met in work and social situations portrayed him as awkward, grim, driven, quick to anger and unpredictable.

Fiercely principled and equally inflexible, he rarely dated and never married. He lived a penurious life, eating little, avoiding luxury and dressing in threadbare clothing that he often bought at the Salvation Army. In 1976, bored with medicine, he moved to Long Beach, Calif., where he spent 12 years painting and writing, producing an unsuccessful film about Handel’s “Messiah,” and supporting himself with part-time pathology positions at two hospitals.

In 1984, prompted by the growing number of executions in the United States, Dr. Kevorkian revisited his idea of giving death row inmates a choice. He was invited to brief members of the California Legislature on a bill that would enable prisoners to donate their organs and die by anesthesia instead of poison gas or the electric chair.

The experience was a turning point. Energized by the attention of lawmakers and the news media, he became involved in the growing national debate on dying with dignity. In 1987 he visited the Netherlands, where he studied techniques that allowed Dutch physicians to assist in the suicides of terminally ill patients without interference from the legal authorities.

A year later, he returned to Michigan and began advertising in Detroit-area newspapers for a new medical practice in what he called “bioethics and obiatry,” which would offer patients and their families “death counseling.” He made reporters aware of his intentions, explaining that he did not charge for his services and bore all the expenses of euthanasia himself. He showed journalists the simple metal frame from which he suspended vials of drugs — thiopental, a sedative, and potassium chloride, which paralyzed the heart — that allowed patients to end their own lives.

First Patient

He also talked about the “doctrine” he had developed to achieve two goals: ensuring the patient’s comfort and protecting himself against criminal conviction. He required patients to express clearly a wish to die. Family physicians and mental health professionals were consulted. Patients were given at least a month to consider their decision and possibly change their minds. Dr. Kevorkian videotaped interviews with patients, their families and their friends, and he videotaped the suicides, which he called medicides.

On June 4, 1990, Janet Adkins, an Oregon teacher who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, was the first patient to avail herself of Dr. Kevorkian’s assistance. Mrs. Adkins’s life ended on the bed inside Dr. Kevorkian’s rusting 1968 Volkswagen van, which was parked in a campground near his home.

Immediately afterward Dr. Kevorkian called the police, who arrested and briefly detained him. The next day Ron Adkins, her husband, and two of his sons held a news conference in Portland and read the suicide note Mrs. Adkins had prepared. In an interview with The New York Times that day, Dr. Kevorkian alerted the nation to his campaign.

“My ultimate aim is to make euthanasia a positive experience,” he said. “I’m trying to knock the medical profession into accepting its responsibilities, and those responsibilities include assisting their patients with death.”

By his account, he assisted in some 130 suicides over the next eight years. Patients from across the country traveled to the Detroit region to seek his help. Sometimes the procedure was done in homes, cars and campgrounds.

Prosecutors, jurists, the State Legislature, the Michigan health authorities and Gov. John Engler seemed helpless to stop him, though they spent years trying. In 1991 a state judge, Alice Gilbert, issued a permanent injunction barring Dr. Kevorkian from using his suicide machine. The same year, the state suspended his license to practice medicine. In 1993, Michigan approved a statute outlawing assisted suicide. The statute was declared unlawful by a state judge and the state Court of Appeals, but in 1994 the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that assisting in a suicide, while not specifically prohibited by statute, was a common-law felony and that there was no protected right to suicide assistance under the state Constitution.

None of the legal restrictions seemed to matter to Dr. Kevorkian. Several times he assisted in patient suicides just hours after being released from custody for helping in a previous one. After one arrest in 1993 he refused to post bond, and a day later he said he was on a hunger strike. During another arrest he fought with police officers and seemed to invite the opportunity to be jailed.

He liked the attention. At the start of his third trial, on April 1, 1996, he showed up in court wearing Colonial-era clothing to show how antiquated he thought the charges were.

From May 1994 to June 1997, Dr. Kevorkian stood trial four times in the deaths of six patients. With the help of his young and flamboyant defense lawyer, Mr. Fieger, three of those trials ended in acquittals, and the fourth was declared a mistrial.

Mr. Fieger based his winning defense on the compassion and mercy that he said Dr. Kevorkian had shown his patients. Prosecutors felt differently. “He’s basically thumbed his nose at law enforcement, in part because he feels he has public support,” Richard Thompson, the prosecutor in Oakland County, Mich., told Time magazine in 1993.

But on March 26, 1999, after a trial that lasted less than two days, a Michigan jury found Dr. Kevorkian guilty of second-degree murder. That trial came six months after Dr. Kevorkian had videotaped himself injecting Thomas Youk, a patient suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease), with the lethal drugs that caused Mr. Youk’s death on Sept. 17, 1998.

Dr. Kevorkian sent the videotape to “60 Minutes,” which broadcast it on Nov. 22. The tape showed Dr. Kevorkian going well beyond assisting a patient in causing his own death by performing the injection himself. The program portrayed him as a zealot with an agenda. “They must charge me; either they go or I go,” he told Mike Wallace. “If they go, that means they’ll never convict me in a court of law.” The broadcast, which prompted a national debate about medical ethics and media responsibility, also served as prime evidence for a first-degree murder charge brought by the Oakland County prosecutor’s office. In a departure from his previous trials, Dr. Kevorkian ignored Mr. Fieger’s advice and defended himself — and not at all well. It was an act of arrogance he regretted, he said later.

‘Stopped’

“You had the audacity to go on national television, show the world what you did and dare the legal system to stop you,” said Judge Jessica R. Cooper, who presided over the trial in Oakland County Circuit Court. “Well, sir, consider yourself stopped.”

On June 1, 2007, Dr. Kevorkian was released from prison after he promised not to conduct another assisted suicide.

He was born Murad Kevorkian in Pontiac, Mich., on May 26, 1928, the second of three children and the only son born to Levon and Satenig Kevorkian, Armenian refugees. His father founded and owned a small excavation company.

The young Jack Kevorkian was described by his friends as an able student interested in art and music. He graduated from the University of Michigan, where he pursued a degree in engineering before switching to medicine.

He was the author of four books, including “Prescription: Medicide, the Goodness of Planned Death” (Prometheus, 1991). He is survived by his sister, Flora Holzheimer. Another sister, Margo Janus, died in 1994.

Mr. Fieger said that Dr. Kevorkian, weakened as he lay in the hospital, could not take advantage of the option that he had offered others and that he had wished for himself. “This is something I would want,” Dr. Kevorkian once said.

“If he had enough strength to do something about it, he would have,” Mr. Fieger said at a news conference Friday in Southfield, Mich. “Had he been able to go home, Jack Kevorkian probably would not have allowed himself to go back to the hospital.”

Dr. Kevorkian was a lover of classical music, and before he died, his friend Mr. Morganroth said, nurses played recordings of Bach for him in his room.

NASA rover Spirit 'revolutionized' how we see Mars
NASA's Mars rover Spirit, shown in an artist's rendering, was expected to serve a three-month mission, but it provided scientists with a trove of information over more than six years of operation. (Reuters)
By Thomas H. Maugh II and Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Time

It was supposed to roam the surface of Mars for only three months and cover a distance of just a few hundred yards. Instead, NASA's Spirit rover traveled nearly five miles over five years, finding geological evidence that the Red Planet had once been warm and wet enough to have harbored life. Even after it got hopelessly stuck in the powdery soil of Gusev crater, the rover continued to make discoveries and beamed them to scientists millions of miles away.

But engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge sent their final commands to Spirit early Wednesday morning, more than a year after the rover made its last transmission to Earth.

After seven years on Mars, the craft had exhausted its batteries, and its electronic innards had probably been destroyed during the long Martian winter, with temperatures sinking to about 150 degrees below zero.

"It's very sad," said Diana Blaney, a geologist and spectroscopist who has been examining the pictures sent by Spirit and its twin rover, Opportunity, since they arrived on Mars. "I honestly thought up until March that Spirit was going to pull through."

Opportunity continues to soldier on on the opposite side of the planet.

Scientists at JPL mourned the loss of Spirit because they, like many people around the world, had come to think of the two explorers almost as living beings, said John Callas, project manager for the rovers. But they also celebrated its achievements.

"It's impossible to think about Mars before the rovers — they've so revolutionized our understanding of this planet," Callas said. "The Red Planet is no longer this distant alien world. It's now a familiar place, and Spirit has given us that."

The launch of the two rovers in 2003 came at a difficult time for planetary exploration in general and for JPL in particular. The lab's previous two Mars missions, the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander, had both failed in 1999. The loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter, which disintegrated as it plunged into the atmosphere, was particularly embarrassing because a contractor had programmed it in English units of measurement rather than the required metric units.

Britain's Beagle 2 lander, scheduled to land Christmas Eve 2003, disappeared without a trace during its descent. That same month, Japan aborted the mission of its Nozomi Mars orbiter because of problems with its navigation system and other equipment.

A lot of hopes were therefore riding on Spirit when it made its fiery descent through the thin Martian atmosphere on Jan. 3, 2004. When the JPL team acquired a signal from the craft at 8:51 that evening, then-NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe proclaimed, "We're back. This is a big night for NASA."

Planning for the Mars Exploration Rovers had begun more than a decade earlier. JPL's initial idea was to investigate what the planet's geology had been like about 3.5 billion to 4 billion years ago, when life was beginning to develop on Earth. A crucial part of the proposal was to make two rovers and deploy in different places.

"The cost is not twice as much as one because a lot of the expense is in the design and validation," Callas said. "You get twice the bang at less than twice the cost."

The initial price tag for the twin-rover mission was $820 million.

Spirit and Opportunity were equipped with a variety of onboard instruments to study rocks on Mars.

Each rover has "eyes" — sharp color cameras that capture images for scientists to study (as well as navigation imagers that help it avoid hazards while driving from place to place). They each have a robotic arm that contains a microscopic imager that is the equivalent of a geologist's hand lens, a rock abrasion tool to help see material just beneath the surface, and spectrometers to examine the composition of the Martian surface.

"Spirit and Opportunity are basically geological explorers," said Ray Arvidson, a professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis who serves as deputy principal investigator for the rovers' scientific payload.

At 384 pounds apiece, each was more than 15 times the weight of Sojourner, the toy-like rover that had been carried to Mars' surface by the Pathfinder mission in 1997. That required a completely new way of doing things.

Seven months into its journey, Spirit entered the Martian atmosphere at 12,000 mph. Thus began a complex descent-and-entry sequence Callas described as "six minutes of terror."

After friction slowed its descent to less than 1,000 mph in just a few minutes, the lander deployed a parachute and reduced its speed to 200 mph. Just before the lander reached the surface, retro rockets slowed it almost to a stop. Seventeen-foot-high airbags inflated and the craft bounced to a halt in massive Gusev crater.

Within hours, Spirit unfolded its panoramic cameras and sent back the first of thousands of images of the Martian surface. On the third day of the mission, Spirit beamed back three-dimensional panoramic images of Gusev, and scientists and reporters donned tacky paper glasses — red in one eye and blue in the other — to observe the spectacular views.

The mission immediately was hit with a scientific curveball. Extensive imaging from orbit had suggested that Gusev had sedimentary rock layers, which would allow the craft to search for evidence of water early in Martian history. But when Spirit landed, researchers discovered that it was really a volcanic plain, relatively uninteresting.

It was only when the craft began making its way to the nearby Columbia Hills that it began to make crucial finds about Mars' potential for harboring life.

With Spirit, lemons always seemed to turn into lemonade. The first of its six wheels broke in 2006, forcing rover pilots to drive the vehicle backward. By dragging the inoperable wheel, Spirit uncovered a kind of rock called amorphous silica. That provided evidence of previous hydrothermal activity, perhaps hot springs like those at Yellowstone National Park or cracks in the Martian crust called fumaroles that once released acidic steam. On Earth, both hot springs and fumaroles are teeming with organisms.

"It's a big deal because not only do you have water, you have an energy source that could drive an ecosystem," Callas said. "It made its biggest discovery because of a setback."

In early 2009, as Spirit was driving toward a pair of volcanic features in the southern hemisphere named Von Braun and Goddard, its wheels broke through the thin crust and sank into powdery sand. A second wheel became immobilized, and efforts to extricate it simply dug it in deeper.

But the craft had plowed so deeply that it found ferric sulfate, calcium sulfate and silica, which could be evidence that snow or ice had been there in the fairly recent past. Scientists were surprised to find evidence of water in Mars' past so close to the equator instead of just at the poles.

In January 2010, NASA officially gave up trying to dig Spirit out, and the explorer became an immobile scientific observatory. Researchers had hoped to use radio signals from the craft to track the planet's wobble in orbit, which might reveal whether Mars had a liquid or a solid core. But the Martian winter was fast approaching, and the craft went into hibernation mode because there was not enough sunlight to recharge its batteries. It sent its final message on March 22, 2010.

"I am very depressed — Spirit has been my baby for seven years now," said John Wright, a member of the rover's driving team who began directing Spirit's movements days after it landed on the Martian surface. "We were waiting and waiting to hear something, and never did."

Even in death, Spirit's scientific contributions will continue, Blaney said. Researchers will monitor the craft and its tire tracks from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to learn how wind and dust remake the Martian surface.

thomas.maugh@latimes.com

The Bibi-Barack Chess Game, Ctd
ANDREW SULLIVAN
(The Daily Beast 22 May 2011)
A reader of “The Dish” makes an important point:

You've been writing things like the following piece of sarcasm:
"Obama committed a foul by actually stating out loud that the 1967 border is the obvious line around which a territorial settlement can be made. He violated the Washington consensus that the American president must let Israel direct and guide his entire relations with every other power in the Middle East."

Let's be fair here. The "US policy" you speak of isn't so much a US policy as it is a US attempt to "direct and guide" Israel's "relations with other powers in the Middle East."
Now, that's not to say I'm against you. The outrage against Obama's position is inexcusable, but that's not because Obama's positions are strictly an American concern and Israel doesn't get a say. It's inexcusable simply because Obama's position is so sensible that nobody should oppose it, regardless of whose mouth it comes from.
I'm also not trying to say that we should follow the lead of one side or the other. America and the international community play an important part in any attempts to broker peace, and if there's to be any hope of achieving this, we and other nations must be able to suggest compromises and exert diplomatic pressure in their support.

What I'm saying is that I think it's important that we see the issue clearly. America is a major power using its influence to interfere in affairs where it has no legitimate state interest. This is justified on humanitarian grounds. (The following are American policy interests which do not morally justify our interference: propping up a useful ally, vindicating our embarrassing past failure to help solve this issue, or pandering to American voters and AIPAC.) All of this is fine, and is nothing to be ashamed of. I would go so far as to say Israel and Palestine themselves should be grateful that the international community is willing to play a role in solving the problems they can't solve themselves.

But I think we lose credibility when we treat the borders of other nations as a "US policy" issue and claim that those nations have no right to criticize this policy. It starts to look like imperialism. And there's just no reason for it: least of all on this issue where we're so obviously right. Wouldn't we be better served by a humble stance which would accentuate how badly the hard right is overreacting?

Andrew Sullivan’s response:

Tactically, yes, which is what Obama is doing. Strategically, yes, as long it isn't interpreted as weakness or lack of will. But here's my core disagreement with my reader: I do think that a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine is a legitimate state interest. I didn't a few years ago. I thought that the whole morass was so fucked up we'd be better off ignoring it.

Two things changed my mind: the realization after 9/11 and the Iraq war that we cannot readjust our relations with the Muslim and Arab worlds by military force alone, that the legacy of the Bush administration was potentially catastrophic without a major re-set, and that Obama's presidency and then the Green Revolution and Arab Spring have given the US a uniquely propitious moment to advance our interests across the globe, defang Jihadism and make strategic advances in the war on terror. The alternative is one Gaza war or Abu Ghraib after another.

And this is a second reason for urgent change. The corruption of permanent warfare, the damage it does to our moral standards, the polarizing effect it has everywhere, the dangers it poses to our constitution: these have persuaded me that we really do have to make a change - as an urgent matter of national self-interest. I see Obama as a providential vehicle for that change. Which is why I want him so desperately to persevere and why I am furious at Netanyahu's Cheney-like contempt for him.

And whether it is fully justified or not, Israel's refusal to agree with a real, contiguous, independent, demilitarized Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem gets in the way. It is the concrete wall between our being able to defuse and defeat Jihadism and our being at its permanent mercy. Sticking to this alliance as doggedly as we have in the past is not helping us and not helping Israel. Obama has been brave in stating this fact, something that is integral to his global promise. He is not just representing the US, he is representing a global generation that will not tolerate this brutalizing kind of dead-end neo-colonialism any longer.

It may well be that the Palestinians will squander yet another golden opportunity. In fact, that seems more than likely. But it is in our core national interest to keep the opportunity alive. It seems to me that the reason Netanyahu is so recalcitrant is that he is afraid that he might get yes for an answer from the Palestinians this time. Hence his desperate attempt to outlast Obama and this window of hope