Italian authorities said Thursday they had seized €20 million of assets in Tuscany, including property, vineyards. and artworks, allegedly bought with money embezzled from Andress. The onetime Bond girl, now 90, had filed a complaint alleging a “progressive and significant depletion of her assets” by her financial managers. - AFP (Yahoo!)
“After The Atlantic cited anonymous sources saying he was, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called it ‘fake news.’ But today the Kennedy Center made it official.” - NPR
“(He) turned everything from computer engineering to life in a nursing home into unexpected bestsellers. … Kidder won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for his 1981 work The Soul of a New Machine, which (explored) a fledgling computer company long before most people cared about the inner workings of Silicon Valley.” - AP
Ross had become a master at catering to ego, facilitating deals and making a class of people feel important. Now he’d begun to wonder if the skills that made him exceptional at his job had also made him in some ways complicit. - The New York Times
“He built a serious and wide-ranging classical career, collaborating with major artists like Eugene Ormandy, Leonard Bernstein and Yo-Yo Ma, without stinting the traditional ballads that John McCormack (1884-1945) had brought to the masses.” - The New York Times
“After a nearly two-week trial in Santa Monica, jurors found Cosby, 88, liable for the sexual battery and assault of Donna Motsinger. They awarded her $17.5 million in past damages and $1.75 million for future damages, … (plus) an additional $40 million in punitive damages,” totaling $59.25 million. - AP
“(Her) memorable film roles included a porn actress abducted by aliens in Slaughterhouse-Five, Lex Luthor’s secretary in two Superman films and an Oscar-nominated performance as the wife of Lenny Bruce in Lenny. (She died) following a 15-year battle with Parkinson’s disease.” - Deadline
Along with his happy student-teacher alliance with Hammerstein, the defining association of Sondheim’s life was his tortured relationship with the mother he described as a “monster,” among harsher words. - The Atlantic
Brendon said that “thousands of people had told him that helped them in hard times. ‘It just got them through, which means that this show is more than just dollars and cents,’ he said. ‘It’s something that needs to be honored.’” - The New York Times
An early profile of Jean Tinguley “defined an approach that informed the dozens of artist profiles he wrote for The New Yorker over the next 62 years … providing the magazine’s readers with a sophisticated guide to often arcane styles and -isms.” - The New York Times
The martial-arts grandmaster starred in more than 20 films, including Return of the Dragon, Missing in Action, and The Delta Force, as well as the TV series Walker, Texas Ranger. - AP
“The Oscar-winning U.S. actor has reached a confidential settlement with three British men who had filed civil lawsuits at London's High Court accusing him of sexual assault between 2000 and 2013. … Two of the claimants gave evidence during Spacey's 2023 criminal trial in London, where he was acquitted of all charges.” - Reuters (Yahoo!)
He wrote more than two dozen novels, from The ICPRESS File (1962) through Billion-Dollar Brain and the trilogies Berlin Game/Mexico Set/London Match (1980s) and Faith/Hope/Charity (1990s). He also wrote historical nonfiction, including a book about JFK’s assassination and Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain. - AP
“It’s a subject I’m anxious to change. I don’t feel symbolic. I feel actual. I feel like I’m a working writer trying to make his work.” The comments come almost four years after the knife attack that wounded his liver, intestines, and right eye. - The Guardian
Habermas "theorized that democracy emerged and could continue to exist in a healthy form only if there was a space that was outside the control of the state, where deliberation and the exchange of ideas could freely occur.” - The New York Times
