Islam Karimov: Uzbekistan president's death confirmed

September 2, 2016, Tashkent, Uzbekistan

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The Uzbek government has confirmed the death of President Islam Karimov, six days after he was taken to hospital with a suspected brain haemorrhage.

One of Asia's most authoritarian leaders, Mr Karimov, 78, died after 27 years in power.

His funeral will be overseen by Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyoyev, seen as a potential successor.

Rights groups say Mr Karimov repressed opposition to his rule but for supporters he represented stability.

He will be buried on Saturday in his home city of Samarkand and three days of mourning will be observed.

A United Nations report has described the use of torture under Mr Karimov as "systematic".

The late leader often justified his strong-arm tactics by highlighting the danger from Islamist militancy in the mainly Muslim country, which borders Afghanistan.

Expressing his condolences in a statement (in Russian), Russian President Vladimir Putin described Mr Karimov as a statesman "who had contributed to the security and stability of Central Asia" and who would be a "great loss for the people of Uzbekistan".

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Uzbekistan's President Islam Karimov, who dominated the Central Asia's most populous nation for more than 25 years, has died at the age of 78 after suffering a stroke last week.

Lola Tillyaeva, one of the daughters of Karimov, announced the news on her Instagram account on Friday, posting a blank picture saying "he has left us ... I am choosing my words, and cannot believe this".

The country's government and parliament also confirmed the death on Friday and said the funeral would take place in Karimov's hometown Samarkand on Saturday.

Uzbekistan's state television announced the death with the presenter saying: "Dear compatriots, it is with huge grief in our hearts that we announce to you the death of our dear president."

Karimov's rule

The former Soviet, whose brutal crackdown on dissent was widely criticised by rights groups, has been at the helm of the strategic country bordering Afghanistan from since before it gained independence from Moscow in 1991.

Karimov lacks a clear successor after being re-elected to a fifth term in 2015 with more than 90 percent of the vote. The country has never held an election judged free and fair by international monitors.

Those tipped to rule after Karimov's death include Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyoyev and Deputy Prime Minister Rustam Azimov, Kamoliddin Rabbimov, an independent Uzbek political analyst based in France, told the AFP news agency.

"I think in the corridors of power they have already started fighting," Rabbimov said, while predicting the elite will be eager to ensure the transition is "more or less stable".

"On the one hand the political elite is fighting each other and regrouping but on the other, they understand they need to keep control of the country. They have gained massive wealth under Karimov."

Karimov's elder daughter Gulnara, a flamboyant figure formerly seen as a potential successor, was reportedly placed under house arrest in 2014 after she openly criticised officials and family members on Twitter.

READ MORE - Uzbekistan: President's daughter and the Panama Papers

Karimova accused her mother and younger sister of sorcery, compared her father with Stalin and attacked the country’s powerful security chief for corruption and harbouring presidential ambitions.

The Uzbek government has long been repeatedly criticised for human rights abuses, most notoriously in 2005 in the city of Andijan, where government forces are accused of killing hundreds of demonstrators.

The United Nations describes the use of torture in Uzbekistan as systematic, and Reporters Without Borders said Karimov frequently broke his own records for repression and paranoia.

Former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, accused Karimov's security forces of executing two dissidents by boiling them to death.

Karimov grew up in an orphanage in the ancient city of Samarkand and went on to study mechanical engineering and economics. He rose up through the Communist Party ranks to head Soviet Uzbekistan in 1989.

Source: Al Jazeera And Agencies///

Islam Karimov Islom Karimov
1st President of Uzbekistan
In office 1 September 1991 – 2 September 2016
Prime Minister	Abdulhashim Mutalov Oʻtkir Sultonov Shavkat Mirziyoyev
Preceded by	Position established
Succeeded by	Nigmatilla Yuldashev (acting)
President of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic
In office 24 March 1990 – 1 September 1991
Preceded by	Position established
Succeeded by	Position abolished
First Secretary of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan
In office 23 June 1989 – 29 December 1991
Preceded by	Rafiq Nishonov
Succeeded by	Position abolished
Personal details
Born	Islom Abdugʻaniyevich Karimov 30 January 1938 Samarkand, Uzbek SSR,Soviet Union (modern Uzbekistan)
Died	2 September 2016 (aged 78) Tashkent, Uzbekistan
Cause of death	Stroke[1]
Political party	Communist Party (1964–91) People's Democratic Party(1991–2007) Liberal Democratic Party(2007–16)
Spouse(s)	Natalya Petrovna Kuchmi (1964–196?, divorced) Tatyana Karimova (1967–2016, his death)
Children	Gulnara (b. 1972) Lola (b. 1978)

Karimov was in stable neurological condition in a coma, but progressively began to experience multiple organ failure. He suffered another cardiac arrest at 20:15 UZT on 2 September

Gene Wilder Dies at 83; Star of ‘Willy Wonka’ and ‘Young Frankenstein’

Gene Wilder, who established himself as one of America’s foremost comic actors with his delightfully neurotic performances in three films directed by Mel Brooks; his eccentric star turn in the family classic “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”; and his winning chemistry with Richard Pryor in the box-office smash “Stir Crazy,” died early Monday morning at his home in Stamford, Conn. He was 83.

A nephew, the filmmaker Jordan Walker-Pearlman, confirmed his death in a statement, saying the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.

Mr. Wilder’s rule for comedy was simple: Don’t try to make it funny; try to make it real. “I’m an actor, not a clown,” he said more than once.

With his haunted blue eyes and an empathy born of his own history of psychic distress, he aspired to touch audiences much as Charlie Chaplin had. The Chaplin film “City Lights,” he said, had “made the biggest impression on me as an actor; it was funny, then sad, then both at the same time.”

Mr. Wilder was an accomplished stage actor as well as a screenwriter, a novelist and the director of four movies in which he starred. (He directed, he once said, “in order to protect what I wrote, which I wrote in order to act.”) But he was best known for playing roles on the big screen that might have been ripped from the pages of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

He made his movie debut in 1967 in Arthur Penn’s celebrated crime drama, “Bonnie and Clyde,” in which he was memorably hysterical as an undertaker kidnapped by the notorious Depression-era bank robbers played by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. He was even more hysterical, and even more memorable, a year later in “The Producers,” the first film by Mr. Brooks, who later turned it into a Broadway hit.

Mr. Wilder played the security-blanket-clutching accountant Leo Bloom, who discovers how to make more money on a bad Broadway show than on a good one: Find rich backers, stage a production that’s guaranteed to fold fast, then flee the country with the leftover cash. Unhappily for Bloom and his fellow schemer, Max Bialystock, played by Zero Mostel, their outrageously tasteless musical, “Springtime for Hitler,” is a sensation.

Death of Ultra Ultra Conservative John McLaughlin dead at 89

He hated Muslims and Arabs to the bone.



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John McLaughlin, the stalwart political commentator who created television’s “McLaughlin Group,” died Tuesday at his home in Virginia. He was 89.

His death came less than two days after he missed the first episode of his show in 34 years.

“As a former Jesuit priest, teacher, pundit and news host, John touched many lives,” the show’s producers wrote on Facebook.

“For 34 years, ‘The McLaughlin Group’ informed millions of Americans. Now he has said bye bye for the last time, to rejoin his beloved dog, Oliver, in heaven. He will always be remembered.”

Ahmed H. Zewail, Nobel-Prize-Winning Chemist, Dies at 70 Obituary

                                                                                               

Ahmed H. Zewail, left, in 1999 after being honored by President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt for winning the Nobel Prize. Credit Reuters 

           

Ahmed H. Zewail, an Egyptian-American who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1999 for developing a revolutionary technique to observe the dance of molecules as they break apart and come together in chemical reactions, died on Tuesday. He was 70.

Dr. Zewail, a naturalized American citizen, was the first Arab to win a Nobel in any of the sciences, and he used that stature to champion science education and research in Egypt and the Middle East.

The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., where Dr. Zewail was a professor of chemistry for four decades, announced his death, but did not have information on where he died.

Mostafa A. el-Sayed, director of the Laser Dynamics Laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a friend of Dr. Zewail’s, said Dr. Zewail had been treated for spinal cancer for about 10 years. His body was being flown to Egypt for a military funeral on Sunday, Dr. Sayed said.

The death elicited a statement from Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who said, “Egypt lost one of its loyal citizens and a genius scientist who spared no effort to serve his country in the various arenas.” Dr. Zewail was a recipient of the Order of the Grand Collar of the Nile, Egypt’s highest honor.

Chemists have long studied chemical reactions by looking at the ingredients they started with, the final products they produced and, sometimes, transitory molecules along the way. But they could not watch the actual dynamics of the process because the breaking and shifting of chemical bonds occurred too quickly. A vibration of an atom in a molecule typically takes 10 to 100 femtoseconds. A femtosecond is a millionth of a billionth of a second.

To capture the molecules in so infinitesimal a moment, Dr. Zewail took advantage of advances in lasers that could fire ultrashort pulses, using them as strobe lights. One laser pulse would set off the chemical reaction, then a second pulse would record the state of the molecule through the colors of light the molecule absorbed and emitted.

By repeating the same experiment many times, varying the time between the pulses, Dr. Zewail and his colleagues could, in essence, piece together a movie of the reaction.

A new field, femtochemistry, was created and flourished.

“He wanted to go somewhere science hadn’t gotten before,” said Peter B. Dervan, a professor of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology.

After receiving the Nobel, Dr. Zewail devoted time to improving scientific research in Egypt. “His idea is, ‘We’ve got to teach them that research is very important,’ ” Dr. Sayed said.

Instead of Egyptians’ going abroad for doctoral studies, as he had, he wanted to create an independent, cutting-edge research institution in Egypt. And with others he did, in Cairo: the Zewail City of Science and Technology, which Dr. Dervan described as “a Caltech in Egypt.”

The cornerstone was laid in 2000, but the project languished until the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Dr. Zewail, who led the board of trustees, spearheaded fund-raising, mostly from individuals. Zewail City opened its classrooms to students in 2013, and there are now 535 students enrolled.

Part of Dr. Zewail’s vision was to restore the Arab world to its historical place as a center of learning. In an op-ed article published in The International New York Times in 2013, Dr. Zewail wrote: “Westerners often forget Egypt’s long history of educational accomplishment. Al Azhar University, a center of Islamic learning, predates Oxford and Cambridge by centuries. Cairo University, founded in 1908, has been a center of enlightenment for the whole Arab world.”

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Dr. Zewail acknowledged that the Middle East had fallen far behind.

“A part of the world that pioneered science and mathematics during Europe’s Dark Ages is now lost in a dark age of illiteracy and knowledge deficiency,” he wrote. “With the exception of Israel, the region’s scientific output is modest at best.”

But he remained optimistic. “I call on Egypt’s leaders, of whatever religious or political persuasion, to insulate education and science from their feuds,” he wrote.

Ahmed Zewail was born in Damanhur, Egypt, on Feb. 26, 1946. After he completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Alexandria University, his advisers encouraged him to go abroad for a doctorate. In the Egypt of 1967, with its ties to Moscow, that usually meant going to Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union. But when the University of Pennsylvania offered him a fellowship, he accepted.

“So, by luck, he came to America, which would not have been the usual route when young Egyptian men of talent were going abroad to get educated in science,” Dr. Dervan said.

After completing his doctorate in 1974, Dr. Zewail worked at the University of California, Berkeley, before becoming a professor at California Institute of Technology in 1976. He earned his citizenship a few years later.

Dr. Zewail was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a foreign member of academies in other countries, including Britain, Russia, France and China. He was an author or co-author of 600 scientific papers.

He served on President Obama’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology from 2009 to early 2013. He also served as the United States science envoy to the Middle East.

Dr. Zewail is survived by his wife, Dema Faham, and four children, Maha, Amani, Nabeel and Hani.

After winning the Nobel, Dr. Zewail switched gears to invent a new form of microscopy using ultrafast pulses of electrons instead of light. The electrons can track, for instance, how layers of graphite vibrate like a drum.

In February, Caltech held a symposium titled “Science and Society” to celebrate Dr. Zewail’s 70th birthday. Before a packed auditorium, he spoke of his efforts to expand research in his native country and the importance of holding to a vision.

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“What do you do after you get the Nobel Prize?” Dr. Zewail said. “It’s my choice, but hopefully it’s a choice that will make an impact. At Caltech, you dream, and you dream big, and the sky is the limit.”