×
Meyssonier Fernand (b. 1931-06-14 / d. 2008-08-08)
He was an executioner in the last years of French Algeria. He acted as an executioner from 1947 to 1961 and executed more than 200. He inherited the job of executioner from his father Maurice Meyssonnier in 1947 when he ended compulsory education. His ancestors had been executioners from ages ago. When Algeria became independent from France in 1961, the guillotine was replaced by execution by firing squad.
Lookup: name or firstname or alias or date (yyyy-mm-dd):
73
Born 1948-09-26. Domain:Music. Cause of death:Cancer (breast)
Dame Olivia Newton-John AC DBE was an Australian singer, actress and activist. She was a four-time Grammy Award winner whose music career included five number-one hits and another ten top-ten hits on the Billboard Hot 100, and two number-one albums on the Billboard 200; If You Love Me, Let Me Know (1974) and Have You Never Been Mellow (1975). Eleven of her singles (including two Platinum) and 14 of her albums (including two Platinum and four 2× Platinum) have been certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). With global sales of more than 100 million records, Newton-John is one of the best-selling music artists from the second half of the 20th century to the present. In 1978, Newton-John starred in the musical film Grease, whose soundtrack remains one of the world's best-selling albums of all time. In May 2017, it was announced that Newton-John's breast cancer had returned and metastasised to her lower back. Her back pains had initially been diagnosed as sciatica. She subsequently revealed this was actually her third bout with breast cancer, as she had a recurrence of the disease in 2013 in addition to her initial 1992 diagnosis. With the 2017 recurrence, the cancer had spread to her bones and progressed to stage IV. Newton-John experienced significant pain from the metastatic bone lesions and had spoken of using cannabis oil to ease her pain. She was an advocate for the use of medical cannabis; her daughter Chloe owns a cannabis farm in Oregon.
74
Born 1945-04-24. Domain:Science (Physics style). Cause of death:Age
Lawrence Gordon Tesler was an American computer scientist who worked in the field of human–computer interaction. Tesler worked at Xerox PARC, Apple, Amazon, and Yahoo! While at PARC, Tesler's work included Smalltalk, the first dynamic object-oriented programming language, and Gypsy, the first word processor with a graphical user interface for the Xerox Alto. During this, along with colleague Tim Mott, Tesler developed the idea of copy and paste functionality and the idea of modeless software. While at Apple, Tesler worked on the Apple Lisa and the Apple Newton, and helped to develop Object Pascal and its use in application programming toolkits including MacApp. Tesler maintained his strong preference for modeless software well beyond his time at PARC. To promote his preference, as of 1995, Tesler equipped his automobile with a personalized California license plate reading "NOMODES". Along with others, he had also been using the phrase "Don't Mode Me In" for years, as a rallying cry to eliminate or reduce modes. His personal website was located at "nomodes.com" and on Twitter had used the handle "@nomodes".
92
Born 1918-08-29. Domain:Science (Math style). Cause of death:Age
John William Jamieson Herivel was a British science historian and former World War II codebreaker at Bletchley Park. As a codebreaker concerned with Cryptanalysis of the Enigma, Herivel is remembered chiefly for the discovery of what was soon dubbed the Herivel tip or Herivelismus. Herivelismus consisted of the idea, the Herivel tip and the method of establishing whether it applied using the Herivel square. It was based on Herivel's insight into the habits of German operators of the Enigma cipher machine that allowed Bletchley Park to easily deduce part of the daily key. For a brief but critical period after May 1940, the Herivel tip in conjunction with "cillies" (another class of operator error) was the main technique used to solve Enigma. After the war, Herivel became an academic, studying the history and philosophy of science at Queen's University Belfast, particularly Isaac Newton, Joseph Fourier, Christiaan Huygens. In retirement, he wrote an autobiographical account of his work at Bletchley Park entitled Herivelismus and the German Military Enigma.
31
Born 1978-11-07. Domain:Sport. Cause of death:Suicide
He was an English international rugby league player.
On 22 February 2010 Newton was banned for two years by the UK Anti-Doping Agency (UKAD) after failing a drug test on 24 November 2009. He was just two games into 2 year deal that he had signed with Wakefield Trinity Wildcats, but the contract was cancelled.
On 26 September 2010, Newton was found hanged in a house on Harswell Close.
71
Born 1933-01-16. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Cancer
She was an American literary theorist, novelist, filmmaker, and political activist.
Sontag drew fire for writing that "Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history." (Partisan Review, Winter 1967, p. 57.) Sontag later offered an ironic apology for the remark, saying it was insensitive to cancer victims.
Sontag sparked controversy for her remarks in The New Yorker (September 24, 2001) about the immediate aftermath of the September 11th, 2001 attacks. Sontag wrote:
"Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word 'cowardly' is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards."
Sontag died in New York City aged 71, from complications of myelodysplastic syndrome. It had evolved into acute myelogenous leukemia. The MDS was likely a result of the chemotherapy and radiation treatment she received three decades earlier for advanced breast cancer and, later, a rare form of uterine cancer. Sontag is buried in Montparnasse cemetery, in Paris, France.
76
Born 1925-02-08. Domain:Performing. Cause of death:Cancer
Jack Lemmon died of "carcinomatosis and metastatic cancer of bladder to colon".
He had been fighting the disease, very privately, for two years before losing the battle.
Lemmon was born in an elevator in Newton, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, where his father, John Uhler Lemmon, Jr., was the president of a doughnut company. His mother was Mildred Burgess Noel.
47
Born 1942-02-17. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Murder
Huey Percy Newton was an African-American revolutionary who, along with fellow Merritt College student Bobby Seale, co-founded the Black Panther Party (1966–1982). Newton and Seale together created a ten-point program to guide the African-American community to liberation. Newton was murdered in the neighborhood of Lower Bottoms in West Oakland, California. Within days, Tyrone Robinson was arrested as a suspect; he was on parole and admitted the murder to police, claiming self-defense – though police found no evidence that Newton was carrying a gun. In 1991, Robinson was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to a prison term of 32 years to life. Robinson stated that his motive was to advance in the Black Guerrilla Family, a Marxist–Leninist narcotics prison gang, in order to get a crack franchise.
31
Born 1954-03-29. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Accident
On April 15, 1975, a few days after moving into her new house, Quinlan attended a friend's birthday party at a local bar. She had eaten almost nothing for 48 hours. At the party, she reportedly drank a few gin and tonics — and took a tranquilizer, believed to be phenobarbital, but perhaps valium or methaqualone — when she suddenly felt faint. Shortly thereafter she was taken home and put in bed. When friends checked on her about fifteen minutes later, they found she was not breathing.
An ambulance was called and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation was attempted. Eventually some color returned to her pallid skin, but she did not regain consciousness.
Karen Quinlan was admitted to Newton Memorial Hospital in New Jersey in a coma. She remained there for nine days in an unresponsive condition before being transferred to St Clare's Hospital, a larger facility.
Karen Quinlan had suffered irreversible brain damage after experiencing an extended period of respiratory failure (lasting no more than 15–20 minutes). No precise cause of her respiratory failure has been given, although her mother has said that the doctors' best guess was that she fell asleep or passed out and aspirated on her own vomit. She was in a coma. Her eyes were "disconjugate" — that is, they no longer moved in the same direction together — and her EEG, while not flat, showed only abnormal slow-wave activity.
She was in a very deep and un-recoverable form of unconsciousness called a persistent vegetative state.
Over the next few months she remained in hospital and her condition gradually deteriorated. She lost weight - eventually weighing less than 80 pounds (36 kilograms). She was prone to unpredictable, violent thrashing of her limbs. She was only kept alive by nasogastric feeding and the constant presence of a ventilator to help her breathe.
After seeing Karen like this for several months, her family finally came to the conclusion that she was beyond hope, and decided to remove her from the ventilator. Hospital officials refused. They were probably wary of a recent, well-publicised case where a doctor, Kenneth Edelin had been charged with manslaughter for performing a late-term abortion. The boundaries of the "right to life" was a topical issue and the hospital's lawyers did not want to risk a legal quagmire.
The Quinlan family persevered, and in 1976 they took their case to the New Jersey Supreme Court, which ruled in their favor. When she was taken off the respirator, Quinlan surprised many by continuing to breathe unaided, and was fed by artificial nutrition for nine more years.
She lived in a persistent vegetative state until her death from pneumonia in 1985. Quinlan was buried at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in East Hanover, New Jersey.
45
Born 1923-09-01. Domain:Sport. Cause of death:Accident
In 1969, on the eve of his 46th birthday, Marciano was a passenger in a small private plane, a Cessna 172 headed to Des Moines, Iowa. It was at night, and bad weather set in. The pilot, Glenn Belz, had only 231 total hours of flying time, only 35 of them at night, and was not certified to fly in such dangerous conditions. Belz tried to set the plane down at a small airfield outside Newton, Iowa, but hit a tree two miles short of the runway. Evidently, the plane was also extremely low on fuel. Rocky, Belz (the young pilot), and 22 year old Frankie Farrell (son of Italian mobster Louis Fratto) were killed on impact. The National Transportation Safety Board report said, "The pilot attempted operation exceeding his experience and ability level, continued visual flight rules under adverse weather conditions, and experienced spatial disorientation in the last moments of the flight.". Marciano was on his way to give a speech to support a friend's son and there was a surprise birthday celebration waiting for him. He had hoped to return early morning for his 46th birthday celebration with his wife. He was coming from a dinner in Chicago at STP CEO Andy Granatelli's home.