Month: May 2020

The winningest coach in U.S. National Football League history, Don Shula, has died at the age of 90.His former franchise, the Miami Dolphins announced his death from their official Twitter account Monday, saying he died peacefully at his home in Miami. Their statement went to say “Don Shula was the patriarch of the Miami Dolphins for 50 years, He brought the winning edge to our franchise and put the Dolphins and the city of Miami on the national sports scene.”Shula played college football at John Carroll University in Ohio and was drafted to play in the NFL in 1951. Shula played defensive back for the Cleveland Browns, the Baltimore Colts, and Washington Redskins through 1957.He became a coach in the NFL in 1960, when he was hired as the defensive coordinator for the Detroit Lions. Three seasons later, the Colts hired Shula to serve as head coach – at 33, the youngest head coach in league history at the time.After the 1969 season, Shula signed to coach the Dolphins and quickly turned them into a dominant team. Miami went to the Super Bowl to cap the 1971 season, where they lost to the Dallas Cowboys. After that the team won Super Bowls in the next two seasons.  This included NFL’s only undefeated (17-0) season in 1972.The Hall of Famer remained the head coach in Miami through 1995, winning the coach of the year award four times. Shula finished with 328 regular-season wins and 19 playoff victories. His regular-season winning percentage translates to a victory rate of more than two out of every three games played.
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CBS News “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl said Sunday that she’s finally feeling well after a battle with COVID-19 that left her hospitalized for a week.
Stahl said she was “really scared” after fighting pneumonia caused by the coronavirus for two weeks at home before going to the hospital.
“One of the rules of journalism is ‘don’t become part of the story,'” Stahl said at the end of Sunday’s broadcast. “But instead of covering the pandemic, I was one of the more-than-one-million Americans who did become part of it.”
Stahl, 78, is the dean of correspondents at television’s best-known newsmagazine. She joined “60 Minutes” in March 1991, and before that was moderator of the Sunday talk show “Face the Nation” and a Washington correspondent.
She landed the first television interview with Donald Trump after he was elected president, and the first with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi when she become speaker — both in 2007 and again in 2019.
Stahl said there was a cluster of “60 Minutes” employees with the virus. One “had almost no symptoms while others had almost every symptom you can imagine,” she said. “Each case is different.”
Stahl said she found an overworked and nearly overwhelmed staff when she was hospitalized but paid tribute to their care, and said she was wheeled out through a gauntlet of cheering medical workers when discharged.
“In the face of so much death, they celebrate their triumphs,” she said.
60 Minutes declined to name the hospital involved.
“Thanks to them, like so many other patients, I am well now,” she said. “Tonight, we all owe them our gratitude, our admiration and, in some cases, our lives.”
Stahl is arguably the most prominent television journalist to disclose they had the disease. CNN hosts Chris Cuomo and Brooke Baldwin have tested positive, the former continuing his prime-time show while fighting symptoms. ABC “Good Morning America” host George Stephanopoulos had it, but like many infected, had only mild symptoms.
The virus has infected 3.5 million people and killed more than 246,000 worldwide, including more than 66,000 dead in the United States, according to a count by Johns Hopkins University. Experts say the numbers are likely larger.
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Idir, an Algerian singer who gave voice to the Berber and Kabyle cultures, has died in Paris. He was 70.Saturday’s death of the singer, whose real name was Hamid Cheriet, was confirmed on a post on his official Facebook page that read “we regret to announce the passing of our father (to all), Idir. Rest in peace.”French media report that he died from pulmonary disease after being hospitalized on Friday.Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune paid tribute to him on Twitter, saying that “with his passing, Algeria has lost one of its monuments,” and referred to him as “an icon of Algerian art.”Idir was a national treasure in his native Algeria.Born on Oct. 25, 1949 in Ait Lahcene, near the Kabylie capital of Tizi Ouzou and part of French Algeria at the time, he studied to be a geologist, but his life took a twist in 1973 when he was called up as a last-minute replacement on the radio to sing “A Vava Inouva.” It was a lullaby with the “rich oral traditions” of the Berber culture and became a beloved song in the country.Idir moved to France in 1975, after finishing military service, where he recorded his first album, also titled “A Vava Inouva,” and a series of popular North African-style songs in the same decade.The style of his music, with lone vocals and acoustic guitar, championed the sounds of Kabyle music, and as such he was widely considered an ambassador of the Kabyle culture.The Berber-speaking Kabyle people are a sub-group of North and West Africa’s wider Berber ethnic population. In Algeria, the Kabyles are a minority that have historically been repressed by the central government and are indigenous to the north of the country, spanning the Atlas Mountains. Many Kabyle settled in France following the Algerian civil war. 
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Gil Schwartz, the longtime CBS communications executive who wrote humorous novels and columns under the pen name Stanley Bing, has died. He was 68.  CBS representatives said Sunday that Schwartz died Saturday at his home in Santa Monica, California. His death, they said, was unexpected, but due to natural causes.  Schwartz had a distinguished nearly 40-year career in corporate America with CBS, Viacom and Westinghouse Broadcasting. He retired in 2018 from his post as senior executive vice president and chief communications officer of CBS Corporation.But unlike most of his peers, Schwartz had a once-secret and then public side career as a lauded humorist and writer of 13 books who satirized the business world he was part of. Under the pseudonym Stanley Bing, Schwartz wrote a column in Esquire for 13 years and then in Fortune. One, “Executive Summary: Stanley Bing,” from 1991, describes an unwelcome 40th birthday in the style of a corporate presentation.  “You’ll have to excuse me if I sound a little morose. I am morose,” he wrote. “This corporation recently celebrated its fortieth anniversary of operations. Quite a few parties were held in its honor, and they succeeded in getting this speaker somewhat depressed in the way that only enforced merriment truly can.”Although he was able to hold the dual identities in secret for a while, in the 1990s, it became “the most poorly held secret in the media business.””Bing’s” books included “Crazy Bosses: Spotting Them, Serving Them, Surviving Them,” “You Look Nice Today,” “Lloyd: What Happened,” and “Immortal Life: A Soon to Be True Story.”Born in New York City in 1951, Schwartz studied theater arts and English at Brandeis University. He was a renaissance man: A poet, playwright, actor, guitarist and photographer of birds, food and travel.  Schwartz is survived by his wife of 14 years, Laura Svienty, two children, two step children and two grandchildren. The statement says a memorial service will take place in the fall. In lieu of flowers, the family requests anyone seeking to honor Schwartz donate to lafoodbank.org, foodbanknyc.org  or sfmfoodbank.org. 
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