Heroine: Odetta

Amazing NY Times Interview - The Last Word
Odetta became a force of the folk music revival in the 1950s. In the 1960s her renditions of spirituals and blues became part of the soundtrack of the civil rights movement.

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BBC News: US folk icon Odetta dies aged 77

Odetta became a folk star in the 1950s

US folk singer Odetta, a civil rights campaigner and a major influence on Bob Dylan, has died at the age of 77.

Born Odetta Holmes in Birmingham, Alabama, the classically-trained singer gave life to slave songs and folk tunes through her powerful voice.

Becoming a folk star in the 1950s, Odetta influenced Bob Dylan as well as Harry Belafonte and Joan Baez.

Despite being recently confined to a wheelchair, Odetta performed some 60 concerts in the last two years.

She died of heart disease on Tuesday at the Lennox Hill Hospital in New York. She had been admitted to the hospital some three weeks before suffering from kidney failure, said her manager Doug Yeager.

She made her name performing songs sung by ordinary people - housewives and working men, as well as prison songs and slave plantation "spirituals".

The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta Bob Dylan in 1978

"What distinguished her from the start was the meticulous care with which she tried to re-create the feeling of her folk songs," Time magazine wrote in 1960. "To understand the emotions of a convict in a convict ditty, she once tried breaking up rocks with a sledge hammer."

Recording several albums, Odetta was best-known in the US for taking part in the 1963 civil rights march on Washington, where she sang O Freedom.

Odetta took part in the 1963 March on Washington

In a 1978 interview, Bob Dylan said: "The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta."

He added he found "just something vital and personal" when he first heard her, and that her music convinced him to sell his electric guitar and play an acoustic one instead.

First nominated for a Grammy in 1963, Odetta received two more nominations in the latter part of her career - one in 1999 and third in 2005.

In 1999, she was awarded a National Medal of the Arts. President Bill Clinton said her career showed "us all that songs have the power to change the heart and change the world".

The perfect woman for the job: "she has no life"

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Open mic oops 2:57
Gov. Ed Rendell is overheard implying that since Janet Napolitano has no family, she has no life. Campbell Brown weighs in.

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Source: CNN | Added December 2, 2008

The story

How many times have politicians been warned about the dangers of an open microphone? And yet, on Tuesday, the lectern mic at the National Governors Conference picked up this little nugget from Pennsylvania's Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell.

He's having a conversation near the lectern about President-elect Barack Obama's choice for to lead the Homeland Security Department, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano. Here is what Rendell said about Napolitano:

Rendell: Janet's perfect for that job. Because for that job, you have to have no life. Janet has no family. Perfect. She can devote, literally, 19-20 hours a day to it

Wow. Now, I'm sure Gov. Napolitano has many qualifications for the job beyond having no family, and therefore the ability to devote 20 hours a day to the job. Watch Campbell Brown's commentary

But it is fascinating to me that that is the quality being highlighted here as so perfect. C'mon. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff is married with two grown children. His predecessor, Tom Ridge, had a family. Anybody remember a debate about whether they would have trouble balancing the demands of work and family? Read full article »

Open mic oops
2:57

Heroine: Sandra Samuel

Nanny credited with tot's daring rescue

Story Highlights
* Sandra Samuel locked self in room when she heard gunmen storm Chabad House
* As gunmen searched house, Samuel unlocked her door and dared them to stop her
* Samuel snatched crying boy from room where parents lay dead, ran to safety
* The two are in Israel with boy's relatives, who run country's largest orphanage

(CNN) -- A 2-year-old survived an attack that took the lives of his parents, thanks to a quick-thinking nanny who grabbed the boy and dashed past gunmen to safety.

Sandra Samuel and Moshe Holtzberg were the only ones to survive a siege on Mumbai's Chabad House last week.

It could be called one of the miracles of last week's tragedy in Mumbai, India. Two-year-old Moshe Holtzberg and nanny Sandra Samuel were the only ones to make it out of the Chabad House alive after gunmen stormed the house, killing Chabad House directors Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, and four others.

Rivka Holtzberg, who arrived in Mumbai with her husband five years ago to serve the city's small Jewish community, was pregnant, her father said at her funeral Tuesday, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported.

Those at the Chabad House were among 179 people killed last week when gunmen targeted several sites across Mumbai, including two luxury hotels, a train station and a hospital.

As the siege at the Chabad House began, Samuel heard the commotion, locked the doors and hid in a room. Watch throngs of Israelis mourn the dead of Chabad House »

"She heard Mrs. Holtzberg -- Rivka -- screaming, 'Sandra, Sandra, help, Sandra,' " said Robert Katz, executive vice president of the Israeli organization Migdal Ohr. Watch Katz describe the daring rescue »

The gunmen reportedly went door-to-door, searching for targets. Samuel unlocked her door and dared the gunmen to stop her, according to Katz.

She then ran upstairs to find the Holtzbergs shot dead, lying on the ground with their son crying over them.

"She literally picked him up and made a dash for the exits, almost daring the terrorists to shoot a woman carrying a baby," Katz said.

The two arrived in Israel early Tuesday on a flight with the boy's maternal grandparents and the bodies of his parents.

"Moshe, you have no living mother and father. ... Today you become the child of all Israel," Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky, a Chabad official from New York, said in a short ceremony at the Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv.

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The return of the bodies was delayed until authorities removed hand grenades from the bodies, left there by the attackers, Katz said.

Leading the efforts to provide Moshe with shelter and support is his great-uncle, Rabbi Yitzchak Dovid Grossman, founder of Migdal Ohr, Israel's largest youth village. It provides more than 6,500 "orphaned, impoverished, underprivileged and new immigrant children" with homes and education.

"Who could have ever predicted that someone who has dedicated his whole life to caring for orphans and children at risk would now be faced with having to care for his own grand-nephew and would need to help bury his own niece and nephew?" Katz asked.

Grossman also secured a one-year visa in Israel for Samuel to assist in caring for the boy as he transitions to his new life, Katz said in a statement on Migdal Ohr's Web site.

The Holtzbergs were laid to rest Tuesday in a service that drew thousands of mourners and emissaries from the ultra-Orthodox Chabad movement to the Israeli village of Kfar Chabad, a village of 900 families just outside Tel Aviv.

Including the Holtzbergs, four Israelis, an American Jew and a Mexican woman were gunned down last week in the attack on Mumbai's Chabad House, a Jewish center where the couple ministered to people from the community and welcomed them to pray, eat kosher food or celebrate Jewish holidays.

In Israel, Moshe will eventually enroll in one of the kindergarten classes operated by Grossman.

"What a sad, tragic coincidence," Katz said.

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