Bobby Smith, R.I.P.

Over the weekend came news of the death of Bobby Smith, the long-time lead singer of the Spinners.  For the youngsters out there, the Wikipedia listing reads as follows:

Robert "Bobby" Smith (sometimes spelled Bobbie; April 10, 1936 – March 16, 2013^[2]) was born in Detroit, Michigan and was an American R&B singer, the principal lead singer of the classic Motown group, The Spinners, also known as the Detroit Spinners or the Motown Spinners, throughout its history. The group was formed circa 1960 at Ferndale High School in Ferndale, Michigan, just north of the Detroit border.

Smith had been the group's main lead singer since its inception, having sung lead vocals on The Spinners first hit record in 1961, "That's What Girls Are Made For" (which has been inaccurately credited to the group's mentor and former Moonglows lead singer, the late Harvey Fuqua). Smith also sang lead on most of their Motown material during the 1960s, such as the charting singles like "Truly Yours" (1966) and "I'll Always Love You" (1965); almost all of the group's pre-Motown material on Fuqua's Tri-Phi Records label, and also on The Spinners' biggest Atlantic Records hits, such as "I'll Be Around", "Could It Be I'm Falling in Love", "They Just Can't Stop It the (Games People Play)". In 1974 they scored their only #1 Pop hit with "Then Came You" (a collaboration with superstar Dionne Warwick). Despite the fact that Smith led on many of the group's biggest hits, many have erroneously credited much of the group's success to its other lead singer, the late Philippé Wynne.

Wynne was many times inaccurately credited for songs that Smith actually sang lead on, such as by the group's label, Atlantic Records, on their Anthology double album collection (an error corrected in the group's later triple CD set, The Chrome Collection). Throughout a succession of lead singers (Wynne, Jonathan Edwards, G. C. Cameron etc.), Smith's lead voice had always been The Spinners' mainstay.

With the 2013 death of Smith, as well as fellow Spinners members Billy Henderson in 2007, and bass singer Pervis Jackson in 2008, Henry Fambrough and G C Cameron are now the last remaining original members of the group. Fambrough is still performing with a current day line-up of Spinners.

*****

For those of us from the "Old School", Spinners music is still alive.  Here's a taste of one of Bobby Smith's best.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfG47NsWVYA

And here is the song that I would listen to while driving (for the first time) over the San Rafael bridge during my commute from a temporary home in Novato to UC Berkeley Law.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePKS9HMrQ_s

Ah, the memories.  Thank you, Bobby Smith.  May you truly rest in 

Peace,

Everett Jenkins

A Ray of Hope in Khayelitsha

Anyone who has visited Khayelitsha, the black township located outside Cape Town, South Africa, can attest to the bleak conditions in which hundreds of thousands of black South Africans there live. However, occasionally a ray of hope emerges from this darkness. Here is the latest ray of hope. Let us pray that it will continue to shine.

Peace,

Everett Jenkins

 

Anders Kelto

Anders Kelto is The World's Africa Correspondent. He is based in Cape Town, South Africa, and reports on health and development issues. Prior to joining The World, he worked with NPR, the CBC, and National Geographic.

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No Excuses, Just Success: The School Year Begins

March 13, 2013 ⋅Post a comment

Students learn in science class. (Photo: Anders Kelto)

This story is part of a year-long series, School Year: Learning, Poverty, and Success in a South African Township.

Listen to Anders Kelto discuss his reporting for the series.

In the middle of the day, a group of men gathers on a street corner to drink beer and call out to women passing by. Around them, metal shacks sprawl out in all directions. Garbage lines the dirt roads.

This is Khayelitsha – one of the largest and most densely populated townships in South Africa. It was built during apartheid, when the government forced black South Africans to live outside the cities.

Today, more than half a million people still live here. Crime, unemployment, and abuse are rampant.

But just up the street, it’s a very different scene.

Opening Ceremony

In a large, cement courtyard, 500 students stand in matching blue sweaters, white collared shirts, and blue ties. They chat and hug, and swap stories about their summer vacations. It’s the first day of school. (South Africa’s school year runs from January through December.)

The students file into an auditorium and sit in rows of folding chairs. Once everyone is seated, a teacher stands and begins singing an old South African hymn. Soon, the whole school joins in.

This school – the Centre of Science and Technology (COSAT) – is a magnet high school that attracts many of Khayelitsha’s top students. Since its founding in 1999, it has been incredibly successful. During most years, every senior graduates, and 70 percent go on to college – despite the fact that most come from poor, uneducated families.

School Principal Phadiela Cooper presents awards at the opening ceremony. (Photo: Anders Kelto)

The school’s principal, Phadiela Cooper, begins the opening ceremony by paying tribute to last year’s graduates – and reminding everyone of the school’s record of success.

“We have a history of [one] hundred percent pass rate,” she says, standing on stage.

She adds that one senior did not graduate in 2012, but that student will retake final exams in March and should restore COSAT’s perfect graduation record.

Zoliswa Lonja, from the Khayelitsha Development Forum – a civic organization that’s trying to improve the township – is also at the ceremony. “You are the chosen few,” she tells the students. “You are citizens of Khayelitsha. So continue making us proud.”

Finally, it’s time for the main event: A ceremony to honor the school’s top academic achievers. Students with the best grades are called on stage to receive a handshake and a box of chocolate. As each name is called, the crowd erupts with screams and applause.

The message of the opening ceremony is clear – students here are expected to do well, no matter what stands in their way. In the words of the school motto: No excuses, just success.

Motivated Students

Sisipho, a ninth-grader with her hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, says the culture at COSAT encourages students to work hard.

“It’s nice because, at the assembly, you get recognized and you get chocolate for your hard work,” she says.
But the drive to succeed is about more than chocolate and recognition.

Tandie, a twelfth-grader with a student government pin on her sweater and an endearing gap between her front teeth, says most of the kids here live in shacks that are falling apart, with no running water and no toilets. She says the conditions in her neighborhood are awful.

“You wouldn’t believe it, if you could see it,” she says.

Tandie (right), a twelfth-grade student, practices singing with Sipho (left), a ninth-grader who plays the keyboard. (Photo: Anders Kelto)

Tandie says she wants to do well in school so she can get a good job and buy her family a “proper house.” Being at a school like COSAT means she’ll have that opportunity.

But it also means pressure. Tandie says her mother constantly mentions how she is counting on her to build them a better life. Like many students here, Tandie says she is terrified of failure.

“Your family’s future depends on you,” she says. “When you make a mistake, [it] all comes crumbling down. Think of how many futures are you ruining.”

That pressure can have tragic consequences. Last year, a tenth-grade boy failed his final exams and was told he had to repeat sophomore year. Principal Phadiela Cooper says she explained to him that it would just take a little longer for him to graduate.

Cooper says the boy nodded and accepted what she said. But after their conversation, he sent text messages to his brother and friends, telling them that he had failed – and that he didn’t feel like living.

“He went home and committed suicide,” Cooper says.

New Pressures

As the 2013 school year begins, the boy’s death looms over the school.

There is also a fear that the pressure on students and teachers will be even more intense this year, because the school is growing – rapidly.

The South African government, having seen COSAT’s success, has forced it to expand from 190 students to 500 in just three years.

That means more kids now have a chance to learn here, but it also means the things responsible for the school’s success are changing. The student-teacher ratio is rising. Instructors are teaching more classes and working longer hours. And, perhaps most important, the standard of admission has been lowered.

“We are getting more of the learners who are not adequately prepared,” says Principal Phadiela Cooper.

Some teachers worry these students will fail.

But what if COSAT can maintain its near-perfect graduation rate, on a much larger scale? What if it can turn even poorly prepared students into budding scientists bound for college?

If this school can continue its record of success, a lot of people will be asking how it did so – and whether this model can be replicated in poor communities elsewhere in Africa and other parts of the world.

Hear Anders Kelto discuss funding for the school and his plans for this series.

Read More
• Video preview of School Year series
• Slideshow: A Typical Day at an Exceptional South African School
• Anders Kelto's School Year Blog

Prehistory

7 Million B.C.T.

The earliest fossils that have been proposed as members of the hominin lineage -- the lineage of mankind -- are Sahelanthropus tchadensis.

5.7 Million B.C.T.

Orrorin tugenensis appeared.

5.6 Million B.C.T.

Ardipithecus kadabba appeared.

The Sahelanthropus tchadensis, Orrorin tugenensis, Ardipithecus kadabba have been argued to be a bipedal ancestor of later hominins, but in each case the claims have been contested. It is also possible that either of these species are ancestors of another branch of African apes, or that they represent a shared ancestor between hominins and other apes. However, the question of the relation between these early fossil species and the hominin lineage is still to be resolved.

From these early species the australopithecines arose around 4 million years ago diverged into robust (also called Paranthropus) and gracile branches, one of which (possibly A. garhi) probably went on to become ancestors of the genus Homo. The australopithecine species that are best represented in the fossil record is Australopithecus afarensis with more than a hundred fossil individuals represented, found from Northern Ethiopia (such as the famous "Lucy"), to Kenya, and South Africa. Fossils of robust australopithecines such as A. robustus (or alternativelyParanthropus robustus) and A./P. boisei are particularly abundant in South Africa at sites such as Kromdraai and Swartkrans, and around Lake Turkana in Kenya.

The earliest members of the genus Homo are Homo habilis which evolved around 2.3 million years ago. Homo habilis is the first species for which we have positive evidence of use of stone tools. They developed the oldowan lithic technology, named after the Olduvai gorge where the first specimens were found. Some scientists consider Homo rudolfensis, a larger bodied group of fossils with similar morphology to the original H. habilis fossils to be a separate species while others consider them to be part of H. habilis - simply representing species internal variation, or perhaps even sexual dimorphism. The brains of these early hominins were about the same size as that of a chimpanzee, and their main adaptation was bipedalism as an adaptation to terrestrial living.

During the next million years a process of encephalization began, and with the arrival of Homo erectus in the fossil record, cranial capacity had doubled. Homo erectus were the first of the hominina to leave Africa, and these species spread through Africa, Asia, and Europe between 1.3 to 1.8 million years ago. One population of H. erectus, also sometimes classified as a separate species Homo ergaster, stayed in Africa and evolved into Homo sapiens. It is believed that these species were the first to use fire and complex tools. The earliest transitional fossils between H. ergaster/erectus and Archaic H. sapiens are from Africa such as Homo rhodesiensis, but seemingly transitional forms are also found at Dmanisi, Georgia. These descendants of African H. erectus spread through Eurasia from ca. 500,000 years ago evolving into H. antecessor, H. heidelbergensis and H. neanderthalensis. The earliest fossils of anatomically modern humans are from the Middle Paleolithic, about 200,000 years ago such as the Omo remains of Ethiopia, later fossils from Skhul in Israel and Southern Europe begin around 90,000 years ago.

As modern humans spread out from Africa they encountered other hominins such as Homo neanderthalensis and the so-called Denisovans, who may have evolved from populations of Homo erectus that had left Africa already around 2 million years ago. The nature of interaction between early humans and these sister species has been a long standing source of controversy, the question being whether humans replaced these earlier species or whether they were in fact similar enough to interbreed, in which case these earlier populations may have contributed genetic material to modern humans.^[61][62]

This migration out of Africa is estimated to have begun about 70,000 years BP and modern humans subsequently spread globally, replacing earlier hominins either through competition or hybridization. They inhabited Eurasia and Oceania by 40,000 years BP, and the Americas by at least 14,500 years BP.^[63]

3 Million B.C.T.

An upright walking australopithecine apeman appeared on the earth in the late Pliocene period and has thumb-opposed hands in place of forefeet, permitting him and his female counterpart to use tools.


1.75 Million B.C.T.

Anthropods used patterned tools.


1 Million B.C.T.

Australopithecine apeman became extinct as the human species became more developed. Homo erectus erectus was unique among primates in having a high proportion of meat relative to plant foods in his diet, but like other primates he was omnivorous, a scavenger who competed with hyenas and other scavengers while eluding leopards.

Chris Kyle, American Sniper

Untouchable in Iraq, Ex-Sniper Dies in a Shooting Back Home

Paul Moseley/The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, via Associated Press

Chris Kyle in 2012.

By MANNY FERNANDEZ and MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

Published: February 3, 2013

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HOUSTON — From his perch in hide-outs above battle-scarred Iraq, Chris Kyle earned a reputation as one of America’s deadliest military snipers. The Pentagon said his skills with a rifle so terrorized Iraqi insurgents during his four tours of duty that they nicknamed him the “Devil of Ramadi” and put a bounty on his head.

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The insurgents never collected, and he returned home to become a best-selling author and a mentor to other veterans, sometimes taking them shooting at a gun range near his Texas home as a kind of therapy to salve battlefield scars, friends said. One such veteran was Eddie Ray Routh, a 25-year-old Marine who had served tours in Iraq and Haiti.

But on Saturday, far from a war zone, Mr. Routh turned on Mr. Kyle, 38, and a second man, Chad Littlefield, 35, shortly after they arrived at an exclusive shooting range near Glen Rose, Tex., about 50 miles southwest of Fort Worth, law enforcement authorities said Sunday. The officials said that for reasons that were still unclear, Mr. Routh shot and killed both men with a semiautomatic handgun before fleeing in a pickup truck belonging to Mr. Kyle.

“Chad and Chris had taken a veteran out to shoot to try to help him,” said Travis Cox, a friend of Mr. Kyle’s. “And they were killed.”

Mr. Routh was captured a few hours later near his home in Lancaster, a southern Dallas suburb, following a brief pursuit. He will be charged with two counts of capital murder, law enforcement officials said.

Friends of Mr. Kyle’s said he had been well acquainted with the difficulties soldiers face returning to civilian life, and had devoted much of his time since retiring in 2009 to helping fellow soldiers overcome the traumas of war.

“He served this country with extreme honor, but came home and was a servant leader in helping his brothers and sisters dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder,” said Mr. Cox, also a former military sniper. “Everyone has their own inner struggles, but he was very proactive about the things he was dealing with.”

In 2011, Mr. Kyle created the Fitco Cares Foundation to provide veterans with exercise equipment and counseling. He believed that exercise and the camaraderie of fellow veterans could help former soldiers ease into civilian life.

Mr. Kyle, who lived outside of Dallas with his wife and their two children, had his own difficulties adjusting after retiring from the Navy SEALs. He was deployed in Iraq during the worst years of the insurgency, perched in or on top of bombed-out apartment buildings with his .300 Winchester Magnum. His job was to provide “overwatch,” preventing enemy fighters from ambushing Marine units.

He did not think the job would be difficult, he wrote in his book, “American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History.”

But two weeks into his time in Iraq, he found himself staring through his scope into the face of an unconventional enemy. A woman with a child standing close by had pulled a grenade from beneath her clothes as several Marines approached. He hesitated, he wrote, then shot.

“It was my duty to shoot, and I don’t regret it,” he wrote. “My shots saved several Americans, whose lives were clearly worth more than that woman’s twisted soul.”

Over time, his hesitation diminished and he became proficient at his job, credited with more than 150 kills. In his book, he describes shooting a fighter wielding a rocket launcher 2,100 yards away, a very long distance for a sniper and his farthest ever.

“Maybe the way I jerked the trigger to the right adjusted for the wind,” he wrote. “Maybe gravity shifted and put that bullet right where it had to be.”

“Whatever, I watched through my scope as the shot hit the Iraqi, who tumbled over the wall to the ground.”

Sheriff Tommy Bryant of Erath County said investigators were still sorting out how the three men had known one another and for how long, though he said Mr. Kyle and Mr. Littlefield had been friends. The authorities said the Saturday trip was the first time the three men had been out together at that shooting range. They said they did not know the motive for the killings.

Untouchable in Iraq, Ex-Sniper Dies in a Shooting Back Home

Published: February 3, 2013

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(Page 2 of 2)

“The suspect’s mother was a schoolteacher for a long time,” the sheriff said. “She may have reached out to Mr. Kyle to try and help her son. We kind of have an idea that maybe that’s why they were at the range, for some type of therapy that Mr. Kyle assists people with.”

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In a news conference, the sheriff said: “They all went out there together in the same vehicle. The suspect may have been suffering from some kind of mental illness from being in the military.”

Pentagon records show that Mr. Routh is currently a member of the Marine Reserves. He was an expert marksman and Marine corporal who had earned several medals, including a Marine good-conduct medal. He served in Iraq from September 2007 to March 2008, Pentagon officials said, and was currently listed as “individual ready reserve,” meaning he could be called back to active duty.

Sheriff’s investigators said Mr. Routh was unemployed and since leaving active military duty had at least one arrest on a charge of driving while intoxicated.

Mr. Kyle’s autobiography was published in January 2012 and became a nonfiction best seller. It turned Mr. Kyle into a celebrity, appearing on talk shows like “Late Night With Conan O’Brien.”

The sudden success of the book surprised no one more than Mr. Kyle, the son of a church deacon who was initially rejected by the Navy when he tried to join in the mid-1990s, because of pins in his arm from a rodeo injury. His first book signing drew 1,200 people. About 850,000 print and e-book editions were sold.

In an interview with The New York Times in March, Mr. Kyle — who received two Silver Stars and five Bronze Stars for Valor — said he had hesitated to write about his experiences. But he was persuaded to move forward after hearing that other books about members of the SEALs were in the works.

“I wanted to tell my story as a SEAL,” he said. “This is about all the hardships that everybody has to go through to get the respect and the honor.”

But he also wanted his sense of humor to come out, he said, noting that he tried to “write in a Texas drawl.”

At a book signing in Kerrville, Tex., last year, Bairbre Bible, a local resident, said Mr. Kyle took a break from signing autographs to share a hug and comforting words with her husband, Jerry, a Vietnam veteran still suffering from post-traumatic stress.

“Chris, just in that short meeting, was a very strong and compassionate person,” Ms. Bible said. “You felt a warmth and a special energy.”

Mr. Bible, 76, who has difficulty speaking, added, “We shared personal pain.”

In gatherings with other veterans, friends said Mr. Kyle would deflect the praise of the inevitable well-wishers and play up the achievements of his comrades.

“He wasn’t the American Sniper to all of his friends,” Mr. Cox said. “He was Chris Kyle and he was right alongside you. He was proud to be a veteran and he would do anything he could to serve veterans.”

Xu Liangying, Chinese Scientist and Dissident

Xu Liangying, Scientist and Advocate, Dies at 92

Xu Liangying in his Beijing apartment in 2006.

By CHRIS BUCKLEY

Published: January 31, 2013

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Xu Liangying, a scientist and an advocate of democracy in Chinawho was renowned for translating the works of Albert Einsteinwhile banished to the countryside for denouncing Mao Zedong’s purge of intellectuals, died on Monday in Beijing. He was 92.

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Mr. Xu in 1949 with his future wife, Wang Laidi. Mr. Xu went from a supporter of the Communist Party to an outspoken critic.

His son Xu Chenggang confirmed the death.

In a life that spanned many of the convulsions of 20th-century China, Mr. Xu evolved from an ardent supporter of the Communist Party into an outspoken critic of the government, giving heart to the pro-democracy demonstrations of 1989 before they were crushed by the military. Threading through that life was his conviction that science, exemplified by Einstein’s achievements, offered China a beacon of reason.

“Superstition is the great enemy of truth,” he told a Chinese magazine, Caijing, last year. “We must use science and democracy to eradicate modern superstitions of every kind, to eradicate superstitions that are born of loyalty.”

Xu Liangying was born in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang on May 3, 1920. He entered Zhejiang University in 1939, determined, he wrote on his entrance form, to become an “authority of modern physics.” As a high school student he had read “The World as I See It,” a collection of Einstein’s essays.

Mr. Xu’s studies were disrupted by the invading Japanese Army, which forced his school to shift from place to place and exposed him to the brute disparities of rural life. Deciding that “total revolution” was needed to transform China, he became a student organizer and joined the Communist Party underground.

After the party came to power in 1949, Mr. Xu’s background as a scientist who had served the revolution won him promotion to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

For a time, he served as a censor in the academy, assigned to scour research papers for any unacceptable views and delicate information. He later spoke proudly of having allowed many papers to be sent abroad for publication, his son said.

But in 1957, the candor that Mr. Xu prized in science brought his downfall. That year, in the “Hundred Flowers” campaign, Mao urged citizens, especially intellectuals, to speak out and expose the party’s failings. But when the response was an outpouring of criticism, Mao condemned his critics as “Rightists.”

Mr. Xu, dismayed by Mao’s reversal, spoke up in defense of the “Hundred Flowers.” He was dismissed from his job, expelled from the Communist Party and condemned as an “ultra-Rightist.”

In 1958, facing imprisonment in a “re-education” labor camp, Mr. Xu persuaded officials to banish him to his home village. He spent most of the next two decades there working as a farmer. In a ruse so that his wife, Wang Laidi, and their two sons could stay in Beijing, the couple divorced, but later remarried.

He began translating Einstein’s works in 1962, relying on friends to send books borrowed from libraries in Beijing, said Danian Hu, a former student of Mr. Xu’s who teaches history at the City College of New York.

But in Mao’s era, not even the abstractions of physics were immune from ideological upheaval. During the Cultural Revolution, radicals from Shanghai showed up at the camp and seized a manuscript of Mr. Xu’s translations of Einstein to use in their campaign to condemn relativity and other findings of what they called “bourgeois science.”

Mao’s death in 1976 ended decades of radical convulsions and gave rise to the reformer Deng Xiaoping, who vowed that science and technology would be at the heart of economic modernization. Tens of thousands of banished scientists and intellectuals, including Mr. Xu, returned from the countryside. He got back his job at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, regained his party membership and published his three-volume collection of Einstein’s works.

Mr. Xu believed, however, that China needed more than the practical applications of science. He and his friend Fang Lizhi, an astrophysicist-turned-dissident who died in April, became prominent voices arguing that true progress would elude China unless it embraced intellectual “enlightenment” and ultimately full-fledged democracy. By the late 1980s, Mr. Xu told The New York Times in 2006, “I gave up Marxism totally and returned to Einstein.”

By 1989 he was a “spiritual figurehead for many of the students” who led the pro-democracy protests centered on Tiananmen Square, said Mr. Hu, the historian. Mr. Xu, who was not directly involved in the demonstrations, was outraged but not entirely surprised when Deng used tanks and armed soldiers to crush the protests, his son Xu Chenggang said.

“He understood very well the nature of this government,” he added.

Again shunned by the party, Mr. Xu lived nearly a decade under police watch in his book-filled apartment in Beijing’s university district. But in his last years he remained a mentor to young people seeking democratic change, said Hu Jia, a Beijing dissident and friend of Mr. Xu’s.

Mr. Xu’s wife, Ms. Wang, a historian, died on Dec. 31.

Besides his son Xu Chenggang, survivors include another son, Xu Ping; a brother, Xu Liangrong; and a granddaughter.

Mr. Xu was awarded the Andrei Sakharov Prize by the American Physical Society in 2008 for a “lifetime’s advocacy of truth, democracy and human rights.” His highest formal academic degree was his bachelor’s degree in science.