• Russian journalist who became symbol after beating dies

    James Hill for The New York Time

    Mikhail Beketov, an editor, was beaten severely in 2008.

    By Ellen Barry, NewYorkTimes.com

    MOSCOW — The Russian journalist Mikhail Beketov, who became a symbol of Russia’s culture of impunity after he was brutally beaten in 2008, died of heart failure on Monday, his lawyer announced. 

    After Mr. Beketov had called for the resignation of the municipal government in the city of Khimki, where he lived, his car was blown up. He later wrote about that in his newspaper, as well, and then was beaten so severely that he spent the rest of his life using a wheelchair, unable to form sentences. Three of his fingers and one of his legs had to be amputated.

    The police barely investigated the crime, ignoring witnesses who came forward offering information and surveillance videos that could have identified Mr. Beketov’s assailants. By then, Mr. Beketov had become a hero to many, and the recipient of several journalism prizes, including one bestowed by the state. 

    Yevgenia Chirikova, an environmental activist from Khimki, said Mr. Beketov never recovered from the attack.

    “In essence, they killed him back then,” she said in a telephone interview. “He was just dying all these years. That’s all.”

    Yelena Kostuchenko, a journalist and friend, told the Committee to Protect Journalists that Mr. Beketov choked on a piece of food at lunch on Monday, which she linked to deep tracheal scarring that he sustained after the attack.

    Mr. Beketov used his own money to finance the publication of a newspaper, Khimkinskaya Pravda, which had a circulation of about 10,000. He wrote scathingly about plans to build a major highway through the Khimki Forest, and of a decision to move a monument to servicemen killed in World War II, known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War. In May 2007, someone beat his dog to death and set his car on fire.

    Mr. Beketov told journalists he suspected the mayor, Vladimir Strelchenko, but the case was closed shortly thereafter for lack of evidence. Months later, Mr. Beketov was still writing: “Last spring, I called for the resignation of the city’s leadership. A few days later, my automobile was blown up. What is next for me?”

    Before he was attacked, Mr. Beketov had warned Ms. Chirikova that something might happen to him, and told her the police should “look in the Khimki administration.” But investigators eventually suspended the investigation for a lack of evidence.

    “The fact that the mastermind of this crime has never been punished, that means that they simply don’t want to look for him,” she said. “They know exactly who did it.”

    Mr. Strelchenko, who said he played no role in the attack, won a slander case against Mr. Beketov in 2010, when the journalist was unable to speak or walk. He remained mayor of Khimki for four years, stepping down for what authorities said were unrelated reasons. Ms. Chirikova said she was never sure whether Mr. Beketov understood that the mayor had left office. “He was so badly disfigured from that moment, he always smiled, it was hard to know whether he was made happy or sad by this news,” she said.

    Municipal authorities in Khimki announced on Monday that they would assist in arranging his burial. In comments to the Interfax news service, Lyudmila M. Alekseyeva, the head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, hailed the “tenacity and heroism with which he defended the dignity and rights of citizens, despite his grave physical condition.” 

    This article, “Russian Journalist Who Became Symbol After Beating Dies,” first appeared in The New York Times. 

    Related:

    Russian Journalists, Fighting Graft, Pay in Blood (May 18, 2010) 

    More stories from The New York Times:


  • Italy's Nobel winning 'Lady of the Cells' dies at 103

    Fabio Campana / EPA file

    Rita Levi Montalcini, who won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1986 for her discovery of nerve growth factor, the first substance known to regulate the growth of cells, in a Feb. 23, 2007, file photo.

    By Associated Press

    ROME -- Rita Levi-Montalcini, a biologist who conducted underground research during World War II in defiance of Fascist persecution and went on to win a Nobel Prize for helping unlock the mysteries of the cell, died at her home on Sunday. She was 103 and had worked well into her final years.

    Rome Mayor Gianni Alemanno, announcing her death in a statement, called it a great loss "for all of humanity." He praised her as someone who represented "civic conscience, culture and the spirit of research of our time."

    Italy's so-called "Lady of the Cells," a Jew who lived through anti-Semitic discrimination and the Nazi invasion, became one of her country's leading scientists and shared the Nobel medicine prize in 1986 with American biochemist Stanley Cohen for their groundbreaking research carried out in the United States. The research increased the understanding of many conditions, including tumors, developmental malformations, and senile dementia.

    Italy honored Levi-Montalcini in 2001 by making her a senator-for-life.

    A petite woman with upswept white hair, she kept an intensive work schedule well into old age. "At 100, I have a mind that is superior — thanks to experience — than when I was 20," she said in 2009.

    "A beacon of life is extinguished" with her death, said a niece, Piera Levi-Montalcini, who is a city councilwoman in Turin. The ANSA news agency quoted her as saying her aunt didn't suffer.

    Levi-Montalcini was born April 22, 1909, to a Jewish family in the northern city of Turin. At age 20 she overcame her father's objections that women should not study and obtained a degree in medicine and surgery from Turin University in 1936.

    She studied under top anatomist Giuseppe Levi, whom she often credited for her own success and for that of two fellow students and close friends, Salvador Luria and Renato Dulbecco, who also became Nobel Prize winners. Levi and Levi-Montalcini were not related.

    After graduating, Levi-Montalcini began working as a research assistant in neurobiology but lost her job in 1938 when Italy's Fascist regime passed laws barring Jews from universities and major professions.

    Her family decided to stay in Italy and, as World War II neared, Levi-Montalcini created a makeshift lab in her bedroom where she began studying the development of chicken embryos, which would later lead to her major discovery of mechanisms that regulate growth of cells and organs.

    With eggs becoming a rarity due to the war, the young scientist biked around the countryside to buy them from farmers. She was soon joined in her secret research by Levi, her university mentor, who was also Jewish and who became her assistant.

    "She worked in primitive conditions," Italian astrophysicist Margherita Hack told Sky TG24 TV in a tribute to her fellow scientist. "She is really someone to be admired."

    The 1943 German invasion of Italy forced the Levi-Montalcini family to flee to Florence and live underground. After the Allies liberated the city, she worked as a doctor at a center for refugees.

    In 1947 Levi-Montalcini was invited to the United States, where she remained for more than 20 years, which she called "the happiest and most productive" period of her life. She held dual Italian-U.S. citizenship.

    During her research at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, she discovered nerve growth factor, the first substance known to regulate the growth of cells. She showed that when tumors from mice were transplanted to chicken embryos they induced rapid growth of the embryonic nervous system. She concluded that the tumor released a nerve growth-promoting factor that affected certain types of cells.

    The research increased the understanding of many conditions, including tumors, developmental malformations, and senile dementia. It also led to the discovery by Cohen of another substance, epidermal growth factor, which stimulates the proliferation of epithelial cells.

    Another Italian scientist, who worked for some 40 years with Levi-Montalcini, including in the United States, said the work the Nobel laureate did on nerve growth factor was continuing.

    "Over the years, this field of investigation has become ever more important in the world of neuroscience," Pietro Calissano was quoted by ANSA as saying. "… We are working on a possible application in the treatment of Alzheimer's."

    Levi-Montalcini returned to Italy to become the director of the laboratory of cell biology of the National Council of Scientific Research in Rome in 1969.

    After retiring in the late 1970s, she continued to work as a guest professor and wrote several books to popularize science. She created the Levi-Montalcini Foundation to grant scholarships and promote educational programs worldwide, particularly for women in Africa.

    She also became active in Parliament, especially between 2006 and 2008, when she and other life senators would cast their votes to back the thin majority of center-left Premier Romano Prodi.

    Levi-Montalcini had no children and never married, fearing such ties would undercut her independence.

    "I never had any hesitation or regrets in this sense," she said in a 2006 interview. "My life has been enriched by excellent human relations, work and interests. I have never felt lonely."

    There was no immediate announcement of funeral or memorial services.

    More world stories from NBC News:

    Follow World News from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook

     

     

    © 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

  • US Ambassador Chris Stevens was 'courageous and exemplary,' Obama says

    By Alastair Jamieson, NBC News

    J. Christopher Stevens, the U.S. Ambassador to Libya who was among four Americans killed amid protests in Libya, was a "courageous and exemplary representative of the United States," President Barack Obama said in a statement on Wednesday.

    The four -- who also included Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith, a father of two -- "exemplified America's commitment to freedom, justice, and partnership with nations and people around the globe," Obama said.

    Born in 1960 in northern California, Stevens had been a diplomat for two decades after previously working as an international trade lawyer in Washington, D.C., according to his biography on the State Department website.

    "Chris was committed to advancing America's values and interests, even when that meant putting himself in danger," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Wednesday in a statement posted on the official Facebook page of the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli.

     

    Ben Curtis / AP, file

    U.S. envoy Chris Stevens speaks to local media at the Tibesty Hotel in Benghazi, Libya, in this Monday, April 11, 2011 file photo.

    "I had the privilege of swearing in Chris for his post in Libya only a few months ago. As the conflict in Libya unfolded, Chris was one of the first Americans on the ground in Benghazi. He risked his own life to lend the Libyan people a helping hand to build the foundation for a new, free nation. He spent every day since helping to finish the work that he started."

    Stevens had only just taken up his appointment, arriving in May after having served two previous roles in the country: Special Representative to the Libyan Transitional National Council during the Libyan revolution from March 2011 to November 2011, and Deputy Chief of Mission from 2007 to 2009.

    US ambassador, 3 others killed in attacks on Libya mission

    He had also previously worked in Jerusalem, Damascus and Riyadh and was a Pearson Fellow with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. From 1983 to 1985 he taught English as a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco.

    A video posted on the U.S. Embassy's official YouTube channel in May showed Stevens introducing himself to the Libyan people and speaking of his excitement at his new role.

    President Obama, alongside Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, condemns "in the strongest terms" the "outrageous and shocking attack" that claimed the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

    He was fluent in Arabic and French, and had earned an undergraduate degree at the University of California at Berkeley in 1982, a J.D. from the University of California's Hastings College of Law in 1989, and an M.S. from the National War College in 2010.

    'Smiling, easygoing'
    The Washington Post reported that Stevens was "smiling, easygoing and friendly" and "well-known at the State Department and on Capitol Hill."

    His efforts to improve relations between the U.S. and Libya were underlined at one of his most recent public appearances. At a reception in Tripoli on August 26, he announced that the issuing of U.S. visas to Libyans would resume the following morning, according to a report in The Tripoli Post.

    "The reopening of our consular section will create new opportunities for deepening the ties between our two countries," the newspaper quoted him as saying. "Relationships between governments are important, but relationships between people are the real foundation of mutual understanding," Stevens said.

    A statement from Frank Wu, Chancellor and Dean of the University of California's Hastings College of the Law, issued to NBC Bay Area station KNTV, said: "The Ambassador was performing the highest role that a lawyer is called upon to perform: public service. He and I communicated when he was appointed Ambassador. He had been looking forward to sharing his experiences with students when he returned. This is a tragedy. We mourn this loss."

    U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Select Committee on Intelligence, also issued a statement, saying: "I had the chance of meeting Ambassador Chris Stevens during his confirmation process and again when I visited Libya last year. He was an exemplary diplomat and his embassy staff could not have been more helpful and knowledgeable during my visit. My prayers are with the families and loved ones of these courageous diplomats who were working to help the Libyan people rise from the ashes of Gaddafi's rule."

    Steven McDonald, a longtime friend of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens who was killed in the consulate attack in Libya, comments on his friend's compassion, integrity and commitment.

    Lara Friedman, director of policy and government relations at Israeli-American charity, Americans for Peace Now, who described herself as a friend of Stevens, posted on Twitter that his death was "incomprehensible, tragic."

    The BBC reported that, in diplomatic cables leaked by the WikiLeaks site in 2010, Stevens had once described Col. Moammar Gadhafi as "notoriously mercurial" and wrote that he could be an "engaging and charming interlocutor."

    Sean Smith was a husband and a father of two, who joined the State Department ten years ago, Clinton's statement said. "Like Chris, Sean was one of our best. Prior to arriving in Benghazi, he served in Baghdad, Pretoria, Montreal, and most recently The Hague," it said.

    More world stories from NBC News:

    Follow World News from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook