Showing posts with label Island. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Island. Show all posts

2011/07/28

Search for bodies on Norwegian island ends (Reuters)

OSLO (Reuters) – Norwegian police on Thursday ended a six-day search for bodies on the island where Anders Behring Breivik shot dead 68 people, and said they were increasingly certain he acted alone.

Breivik, 32, killed a total of 76 people, in a bomb attack in central Oslo and then in the shooting rampage at the island summer camp for the ruling Labour Party's youth wing.

"The search at Utoeya (island) has been completed," police Chief of Staff Johan Fredriksen told a news conference.

A search for bodies in the surrounding Tyrifjord lake was continuing. Police had received a number of bomb threats but these were not considered credible, Fredriksen said.

Police said they were trying to reassure Norwegians after the worst attack in their modern history.

"In general we are trying to be visible to the public to try to contribute to the sense of security," he said.

Chief national prosecutor Tor-Aksel Busch said Breivik would not go on trial until 2012 and that additional charges might be brought, to include crimes against humanity as well as terrorism charges.

"We hope we can carry out a trial in the district court during next year," he told public broadcaster NRK.

Wearing a police uniform, Breivik massacred youths trapped on the island and shot at those who tried to swim to shore some 500 meters (yards) away. Authorities believe some may have drowned.

Police published the names of 24 more of the dead on Thursday, raising the total identified to 41.

Breivik has told police he was not a lone wolf but part of a network in a "crusade" against Islam and multiculturalism, but Norwegian authorities say they doubt this.

"We have to consider the possibility but at this moment we have no indication of that," police lawyer Paal-Fredrik Hjort Kraby said. "He said in his manifesto that he was all alone and we are trying to find out if this is correct."

Police will interrogate Breivik on Friday for the second time since he was arrested. Investigators have been working in cooperation with other European nations and the United States.

"CLEAR WARNING" FOR EUROPE

The risk of copycat bombings remains low, police said, even though the attack comes against a backdrop of rising anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe as countries struggle to contain debt crises and revive flagging economies.

"Europe has received a clear warning from Norway," wrote Thorbjoern Jagland, the former Norwegian prime minister who is now the leader of the Nobel Peace Prize committee and Secretary General of the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe.

"It's possible that Breivik has operated completely alone. But I'm afraid he may have initiated a new trend. While we've all been preoccupied with Muslims and radical Islam, this has been allowed to quietly develop," Jagland wrote in an article called "The racism in Europe" published by daily Aftenposten.

"We see a new form of nationalism, in a new disguise. But the old wisdom is still valid: all nationalism comes from something bad and leads to something bad."

Austria's main far-right party, sensitive to criticism about its anti-foreigner stance as it seeks election in 2013, expelled one of its parliamentary representatives on Thursday for comments about the Norway attacks.

Freedom Party official Werner Koenigshofer wrote on social networking site Facebook that "the Islamists in Europe have attacked a thousand times more often," and on his website said the massacre of children should make people rethink abortion.

The remarks were widely reported in Austria media before disappearing. "He got the red card because of this behavior, which is damaging for the party," Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache said in a statement.

"NOT HUMAN"

Norway has promised a review of the country's security services and their actions during Breivik's attacks. Police have come under criticism, including from some survivors, for taking an hour to get to the island 42 km (28 miles) from Oslo.

On a pier jutting out from a campsite across the lake from Utoeya, where some of the survivors first reached shore, mourners laid flowers, lit candles and left messages for the dead.

Pictures and children's drawings adorned the site. One crayon drawing showed the green island and dozens of faces in the waters around it.

"What happened here is not human," said social worker Heidi Weum Knutsen, looking out at Utoeya. "Young innocent people were hunted down and killed. That is the worst thing someone can do."

Paramedic Haavard Larsen, who coordinated the health services' response to the island shootings last Friday, said many survivors were completely silent when they made it to shore.

"It's difficult to describe but if you saw old movies from concentration camps, that was a little bit their impression -- empty looks, extremely traumatized," Larsen said.

"One of my colleagues was trying to help a child ashore, and the kid stepped back and asked -- 'are you going to shoot me?'"

Clinical psychologist Therese Brask-Rustad, who helped the victim's families, said Breivik intentionally played on Norwegians' overwhelming trust in the police force of the affluent and usually peaceful Nordic state.

"He shattered their belief about who can be trusted. Shattered their assumptions about the world. It's a wonderful holiday island that became a nightmare."

(With reporting by Alister Doyle, Terje Solsvik, Henrik Stoelen, Mohammed Abbas, Aasa Christine Stoltz, Victoria Klesty, Ole Petter Skonnord and Sylvia Westall in Vienna; editing by Andrew Roche)


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2011/07/12

Creator of 'Brady Bunch,' 'Gilligan's Island' dies (AP)

LOS ANGELES – Sherwood Schwartz, writer-creator of two of the best-remembered TV series of the 1960s and 1970s, "Gilligan's Island" and "The Brady Bunch," has died at age 94.

Great niece Robin Randall said Schwartz died at 4 a.m. Tuesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he was being treated for an intestinal infection and underwent several surgeries. His wife, Mildred, and children had been at his side.

Sherwood Schwartz and his brother, Al, started as a writing team in TV's famed 1950s "golden age," said Douglas Schwartz, the late Al Schwartz's son.

"They helped shape television in its early days," Douglas Schwartz said. "Sherwood is an American classic, creating `Brady Bunch' and `Gilligan's Island,' iconic shows that are still popular today. He continued to produce all the way up into his 90s."

Sherwood Schwartz was working on a big-screen version of "Gilligan's Island," his nephew said. Douglas Schwartz, who created the hit series "Baywatch," called his uncle a longtime mentor and caring "second father" who helped guide him successfully through show business.

Success was the hallmark of Sherwood Schwartz's own career. Neither "Gilligan" nor "Brady" pleased the critics, but both managed to reverberate in viewers' heads through the years as few such series did, lingering in the language and inspiring parodies, spinoffs and countless standup comedy jokes.

Schwartz had given up a career in medical science to write jokes for Bob Hope's radio show. He went on to write for other radio and TV shows, including "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet."

He dreamed up "Gilligan's Island" in 1964. It was a Robinson Crusoe story about seven disparate travelers who are marooned on a deserted Pacific Island after their small boat wrecks in a storm. The cast: Alan Hale Jr., as Skipper Jonas Grumby; Bob Denver, as his klutzy assistant Gilligan; Jim Backus and Natalie Schafer, the rich snobs Thurston and Lovey Howell; Tina Louise, the bosomy movie star Ginger Grant; Russell Johnson, egghead science professor Roy Hinkley Jr.; and Dawn Wells, sweet-natured farm girl Mary Ann Summers.

TV critics hooted at "Gilligan's Island" as gag-ridden corn. Audiences adored its far-out comedy. Schwartz insisted that the show had social meaning along with the laughs: "I knew that by assembling seven different people and forcing them to live together, the show would have great philosophical implications."

He argued that his sitcoms didn't rely on cheap laughs. "I think writers have become hypnotized by the number of jokes on the page at the expense of character," Schwartz said in a 2000 Associated Press interview.

"When you say the name Gilligan, you know who that is. If a show is good, if it's written well, you should be able to erase the names of the characters saying the lines and still be able to know who said it. If you can't do that, the show will fail."

"Gilligan's Island" lasted on CBS from 1964 to 1967, and it was revived in later seasons with three high-rated TV movies. A children's cartoon, "The New Adventures of Gilligan," appeared on ABC from 1974 to 1977, and in 2004, Schwartz had a hand in producing a TBS reality show called "The Real Gilligan's Island."

The name of the boat on "Gilligan's Island" — the S.S. Minnow — was a bit of TV inside humor: It was named for Newton Minow, who as Federal Communications Commission chief in the early 1960s had become famous for proclaiming television "a vast wasteland."

Minow took the gibe in good humor, saying later that he had a friendly correspondence with Schwartz.

TV writers usually looked upon "The Brady Bunch" as a sugarcoated view of American family life.

The premise: a widow (Florence Henderson) with three daughters marries a widower (Robert Reed) with three sons. (Widowhood was a common plot point in TV series back then, since networks were leery of divorce.) During the 1970s when the nation was rocked by social turmoil, audiences seemed comforted by watching an attractive, well-scrubbed family engaged in trivial pursuits.

Schwartz claimed in 1995 that his creation had social significance because "it dealt with real emotional problems: the difficulty of being the middle girl; a boy being too short when he wants to be taller; going to the prom with zits on your face."

The series lasted from 1969 to 1974, but it had an amazing afterlife. It was followed by three one-season spinoffs: "The Brady Bunch Hour" (1977), "The Brady Brides" (1981) and "The Bradys" (1990). "The Brady Bunch Movie," with Shelley Long and Gary Cole as the parents, was a surprise box-office hit in 1995.

It was followed the next year by a less successful "A Very Brady Sequel."

Sherwood Schwartz was born in 1916 in Passaic, N.J., and grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. His brother, already working for Hope, got him a job when Sherwood was still in college.

"Bob liked my jokes, used them on his show and got big laughs. Then he asked me to join his writing staff," Schwartz said during an appearance in March 2008, when he got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. "I was faced with a major decision — writing comedy or starving to death while I cured those diseases. I made a quick career change."

Besides his wife, Schwartz's survivors include sons Donald, Lloyd and Ross Schwartz, and daughter Hope Juber.

___

Former Associated Press Writer Bob Thomas and AP Television Writer Lynn Elber contributed to this report.


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