… died in the plane crash in Libya.

An Irish author, Bree O’Mara, who was on her way to London hoping to finalise a publishing contract for her second novel, has been named among the 103 who died in the Libyan air crash.

… A publishing deal for her second novel, Nigel Watson Superhero, set in London where she lived in the 1990s, would have been her most significant career break. It should have been signed last month, but she missed the London Book Fair because of the flight ban after the volcanic ash cloud hit, and had to postpone her trip.

… She had worked for many years as a flight attendant in the Middle East, but moved to London in the 1990s to work in film production. She then spent a period living with the Masai tribes in Tanzania, and was discussing a documentary on the Masai with her South African publishers…

… comments, in the Princeton University paper, on the Smolensk crash:

Peter Bogucki, the associate dean for undergraduate affairs at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, expressed faith in Polish democracy and said he believes that the country’s transition to a new president will be smooth.

“They have normal democratic institutions that have orderly plans of succession and clear ways of sorting things out,” he said, contrasting the succession process to the intrigues that marked transfers of power in the Soviet Union. “I think they’ll realize some form of national resiliency that they might not have known that they had.”

Bogucki has done archaeological research in Poland and is of Polish descent. His cousin’s father-in-law was on the plane.

… begins to emerge as their friends remember them. David Harris of the American Jewish Committee recalls:

Mariusz Handzlik was [a] … diplomat whom I first met in Washington years ago, [when] he was serving as undersecretary of state in the office of Poland’s president.

Mariusz and I shared a deep admiration for Jan Karski, the Polish wartime hero who later joined the faculty of Georgetown University. While serving in the United States, Mariusz befriended Karski, becoming his regular chess partner. They were playing chess when Karski suddenly felt ill and died shortly afterward. Together, Mariusz and I cried for this man who, at repeated risk to his own life, had tried to alert a largely deaf world to the Nazi’s Final Solution.

… Andrzej Przewoźnik was secretary-general of the Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites.

I first met him when the Polish government and the American Jewish Committee joined together to demarcate, protect, and memorialize the site of the Nazi death camp in Belzec, located in southeastern Poland. In less than a year, more than 500,000 Jews were killed in an area barely the size of a few football fields. Only two Jews survived.

In June 2004, after years of planning and construction, the site was inaugurated. As the late Miles Lerman said at that solemn ceremony, “No place of martyrdom anywhere is today as well protected and memorialized as Belzec.”

That could not have occurred without Andrzej’s pivotal role. He helped make it happen, overcoming the multiple hurdles along the way. By doing so, he ensured that what took place at Belzec, long neglected by the Communists, would never be forgotten…

… Czeslaw Milosz remembers friends killed at Katyn:

Crimes against human rights, never confessed and never publicly denounced, are a poison which destroys the possibility of a friendship between nations. Anthologies of Polish poetry publish poems of my late friends – Wladyslaw Sebyla and Lech Piwowar, and give the date of their deaths: 1940. It is absurd not to be able to write how they perished, though everybody in Poland knows the truth: they shared the fate of several thousand Polish officers disarmed and interned by the then accomplices of Hitler, and they repose in a mass grave.

A plane carrying the president and other important officials has crashed in Russia. Mr UD tells UD that it was part of a delegation on its way to commemorate Katyn.

**************************

Before he was president, Lech Kaczynski was a professor of law in Warsaw.

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“I fear,” said Mr UD just now, “a lot of historians may have been on board.” He’s having trouble getting to Polish news sites — too much traffic.

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Among those on board, former Deputy Prime Minister Izabela Jaruga-Nowacka:

For her opinions, she has been constantly attacked by right-wing parties and populists. The most spectacular offense, however, came from Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek. In 2002, he called her “a feminist block of concrete that will not change even by means of HCl acid.” The words were repeated by [everyone in the] media. “It did not discourage me at all. Women’s rights issues happily became crucial in EU politics, and more and more Polish politicians see that they are important. If there is a little of my input, I am glad. For sure, I am not going to back off.”

She was trained as an anthropologist, specializing in Mongolian cultures.

NEW FINNEGANS WAKE TO BE MORE COHERENT

Headline in the Kalamazoo Gazette:

SEARCH TEAM FORMED TO FIND
WMU MEDICAL SCHOOL DEAN

SEXUAL SATISFACTION IS A COMPLEX PROCESS
THAT VEXES MANY WOMEN AND THEIR DOCTORS

Headline, Washington Post

Boston’s Crappy Law Schools
Oppose Crappy State Law School

The man who killed four members of the Lakewood police force might be on or near the campus.

Mussolini an anti-Semite.

… has killed himself.

The Chicago Sun-Times seems so far to have the best coverage. A breaking story.

The little pisher won’t be running La Défense.

Brainy old hippies can be spies too. Nozette, recently retired from a long career as a high-security government scientist, was arrested today on charges of spying for Israel in exchange for lots of money.

When he worked for NASA, he told an interviewer for one of their newsletters that he enjoys “listening to The Grateful Dead Channel on Sirius satellite radio.” In this YouTube, he looks very casual-wear — not at all the sort who’d sell defense secrets for moolah.

But. You know. Live and learn.