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Important People Who Died Recently

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Doris Arndt, whose ability to command big cats and bears made her one of Europe’s best-known circus animal trainers in the 1950s and ’60s, a time when men dominated such acts, died on June 21 in Berlin. She was 88.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/29/obituaries/doris-arndt-celebrated-animal-trainer-is-dead-at-88.html?rref=collection/sectioncollection/obituaries&action=click&contentCollection=obituaries&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront



Doris Arndt with a pyramid of polar bears, her most popular act. Friendly and cuddly? Not necessarily. “A polar bear will destroy anything that is weak,” she said.
 
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Ronald Leslie Moore MBE (8 March 1933 – 18 August 2018) was a New Zealand international speedway rider. He twice won the Individual World Speedway Championship, in 1954 and 1959.
Moore was born in Hobart, Tasmania in 1933. He moved with his family to New Zealand when he was still a child, and although he was born in Australia, Moore has always considered himself to be a New Zealander and always rode under the flag of his adopted home.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronnie_Moore_(speedway_rider)

In 1950 at the age of 17, Moore was the youngest rider ever to qualify for the final of the Speedway World Championship. He won the championship in 1954 and again in 1959. He also finished runner up on three further occasions. His first win was all the more notable given the facts that he was still only 21 years of age, that he was riding with a broken leg and that he won with a maximum score.[2]

Goes off with a really big bang!
 
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Hilary Lister (1972 – 19 August 2018) was a British record-breaking quadriplegic sailor. She suffered from the progressive condition reflex sympathetic dystrophy and controlled her ship by using sip-and-puff technology for steering and sails.[1]

On 23 August 2005, Lister was the first quadriplegic to sail solo across the English Channel (in 6 hours and 13 minutes). On 24 July 2007, she became the first female quadriplegic to sail solo around the Isle of Wight (in 11 hours 4 minutes). She won the Sunday Times Helen Rollason Award for Inspiration in 2005. She set off to sail solo around Great Britain on 16 June 2008.[2] Bad weather and technical problems forced her to suspend the attempt on 13 August 2008.[3]

On 21 May 2009, Hilary Lister resumed her attempt from Plymouth. By 14 August she had reached Bridlington, Yorkshire on the east coast. She reached the end of her journey, Dover in Kent, on the evening of 31 August 2009, becoming the first disabled woman to sail solo around Britain.

On 8 January 2010, at the Tullett Prebon London International Boat Show, Lister announced her intention to compete in the 2011 Fastnet Race in a Class 40 boat. In April 2010, Hilary sailed around the Kingdom of Bahrain in support of Bahrain Mobility International.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Lister

Hilary Lister, a Quadriplegic Who Sailed Solo
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/22/obituaries/hilary-lister-dead.html?rref=collection/sectioncollection/obituaries&action=click&contentCollection=obituaries&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=9&pgtype=sectionfront

 
Queeneth Ndaba, Champion of South African Jazz, Dies at 81
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/27/obituaries/queeneth-ndaba-champion-of-south-african-jazz-dies-at-81.html?rref=collection/sectioncollection/obituaries&action=click&contentCollection=obituaries&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=8&pgtype=sectionfront



Queeneth Ndaba, a South African jazz advocate who managed Johannesburg’s most influential home of art and culture during the darkest days of apartheid, died on Aug. 15 at a hospital in Boksburg. She was 81.

http://www.theheritageportal.co.za/article/dorkay-house-hangs
Queeneth Ndaba has been associated with Dorkay House for decades. I had phoned her to ask about the two places and after we chatted for a while, she invited me to come and visit her. She told me to meet her at Madiba Village, opposite the Bantu Men’s Social Centre.




 
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According to the South China Morning Post, a family spokesperson confirmed that Winnie Ho Yuen-ki passed away on 5 June 2018 at Hong Kong Sanatorium & Hospital following a long battle with illness.
She was thrust under the spotlight over her business dispute with her brother in the 2000s, and more recently in a court case highlighting an old affair with cousin and billionaire Eric Hotung

Ho worked alongside her brother at Sociedade de Turismo e Diversoes de Macau (STDM) – the Macau gaming monopoly he co-founded – for 23 years between 1977 and 2000 but their relationship soured in a family powerplay after liberalization of the Macau casino industry.

After Stanley Ho gained control of STDM, the pair spent the next eight years engaged in legal disputes over Winnie Ho’s interests in the company, finally settling in 2008 when STDM created its new gaming arm, SJM Holdings.

Stanley Ho has himself been gravely ill since suffering a bad fall in 2009 and stepped down as Chairman of SJM earlier this year. Daughter Daisy Ho has since taken over that role. Stanley Ho also stepped down as Executive Chairman of Shun Tak Holdings in July 2017, with another of his daughters – MGM China Co-Chairperson and Executive Director Pansy Ho – subsequently stepping into the top job.
http://www.macaubusiness.com/macau-winnie-ho-yuen-ki-sister-of-stanley-ho-passed-away-aged-95/
 
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Iosif Kobzon, Known as the ‘Russian Frank Sinatra,’ Dies at 80
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/02/obituaries/iosif-kobzon-dies-at-80.html?rref=collection/sectioncollection/obituaries&action=click&contentCollection=obituaries&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

He is said to have recorded 3,000 songs, and even after he announced his retirement from singing in 1997 he continued to perform for official holiday observances and for police and military parades. President Vladimir V. Putin, whom Mr. Kobzon supported, issued a statement at Mr. Kobzon’s death calling him “truly a people’s artist, an outstanding Russian cultural personality, a man of immense inner strength, courage and dignity.”

Iosif Davidovich Kobzon was born on Sept. 11, 1937, in Chasov Yar, in the coal-mining region of eastern Ukraine, into a Jewish family. He was proud of that heritage, promoting Russian Jewish culture and standing up to anti-Semitism during his careers as a singer and a politician.

But many in Russia regarded him not only as a national treasure but also as a hero. He performed for troops and workers in Chernobyl just weeks after the nuclear accident there. And in 2002, when Chechen rebels seized hundreds of hostages in a Moscow theater, he was among a handful of negotiators who entered the building to try negotiating with the rebels.

 
The Nanking Massacre was an episode of mass murder and mass rape committed by Japanese troops against the residents of Nanjing (Nanking), then the capital of the Republic of China, during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The massacre is also known as the Rape of Nanking or, using Pinyin romanization, the Nanjing Massacre or Rape of Nanjing.

The massacre occurred over a period of six weeks starting on December 13, 1937, the day that the Japanese captured Nanjing. During this period, soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army murdered Chinese civilians and disarmed combatants who numbered an estimated 40,000 to over 300,000,[7][8] and perpetrated widespread rape and looting.[9][10]

After losing the Battle of Shanghai, Chiang Kai-shek knew that the fall of Nanjing was a matter of time. He and his staff realized that they could not risk the annihilation of their elite troops in a symbolic but hopeless defense of the capital. To preserve the army for future battles, most of it was withdrawn. Chiang's strategy was to follow the suggestion of his German advisers to draw the Japanese army deep into China and use China's vast territory as a defensive strength. Chiang planned to fight a protracted war of attrition to wear down the Japanese in the hinterland of China.[22]

Although the massacre is generally described as having occurred over a six-week period after the fall of Nanjing, the crimes committed by the Japanese army were not limited to that period. Many atrocities were reported to have been committed as the Japanese army advanced from Shanghai to Nanjing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre

 
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Ms. Oversteegen and her sister began their resistance careers by distributing pamphlets (“The Netherlands have to be free!”) and hanging anti-Nazi posters (“For every Dutch man working in Germany, a German man will go to the front!”). Their efforts apparently attracted the attention of Frans van der Wiel, commander of the underground Haarlem Council of Resistance, who invited them to join his team — with their mother’s permission.

When she rode her bicycle down the streets of Haarlem in North Holland, firearms hidden in a basket, Nazi officials rarely stopped to question her. When she walked through the woods, serving as a lookout or seductively leading her SS target to a secluded place, there was little indication that she carried a handgun and was preparing an execution.


Yet Freddie Oversteegen and her sister Truus, two years her senior, were rare exceptions — a pair of teenage women who took up arms against Nazi occupiers and Dutch “traitors” on the outskirts of Amsterdam. With Hannie Schaft, a onetime law student with fiery red hair, they sabotaged bridges and rail lines with dynamite, shot Nazis while riding their bikes, and donned disguises to smuggle Jewish children across the country and sometimes out of concentration camps.

In perhaps their most daring act, they seduced their targets in taverns or bars, asked if they wanted to “go for a stroll” in the forest — and “liquidated” them, as Ms. Oversteegen put it, with a pull of the trigger.


After the war ended in 1945, Truus worked as an artist, making paintings and sculptures inspired by her years with the resistance, and wrote a popular memoir, “Not Then, Not Now, Not Ever.” She died in 2016, two years after Prime Minister Mark Rutte awarded the sisters the Mobilization War Cross, a military honor for service in World War II.

For her part, Freddie Oversteegen told Vice that she coped with the traumas of the war “by getting married and having babies.” She married Jan Dekker, taking the name Freddie Dekker-Oversteegen, and raised three children. They survive her, as do her half brother and four grandchildren. Her husband, who worked at the steel company Hoogovens, is deceased.

In interviews, Ms. Oversteegen often spoke of the physics of killing — not the feel of the trigger or kick of the gun, but the inevitable collapse that followed, her victims’ fall to the ground.
 
Rosa Bouglione, Doyenne of a French Circus Family, Dies at 107
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/obituaries/rosa-bouglione-dead.html?rref=collection/sectioncollection/obituaries&action=click&contentCollection=obituaries&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

They had seven children. Joseph Bouglione died in 1987. The family said that Ms. Bouglione is survived by a total of 55 children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren.

The Bougliones began touring with the Cirque d’Hiver in 1935 after rescuing it from bankruptcy the year before. During World War II, with the couple’s Romany roots concealed behind the Bouglione family’s Italian-sounding name, the company was permitted to operate despite the Nazi occupation. The couple protected Jewish performers and secreted weapons for the French Resistance.

As the years went on, Ms. Bouglione moved from performing in the circus to managing it.

The Cirque d’Hiver building in Paris. The Bouglione family has owned the Cirque d’Hiver since 1934.
 
SirRumpole said:
Important People who died recently.
Click to expand...

Ahhhh yes SirRumpole. I considered that as the racehorse is Australian it counts as a person due to achievements.
However, I have put this to the board of Important People. Congratulations as you have won your appeal. Unfortunately, once again, time has run out to delete it - basically, tough cookies
 

Giddyap !
 
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