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Wednesday, January 28, 2015 Trail Times
PEOPLE GENEROUS DONATION IN MEMORY OF WIFE AND GRANDDAUGHTER
DENIS ROUSSOS
Greek singer sold millions of records in Europe THE ASSOCIATED PRESS ATHENS, Greece - Greek singer Demis Roussos, whose often high-pitched pop serenades won him household recognition in the 1970s and 1980s across Europe and beyond and who sold more than 60 million records, has died in Athens at the age of 68, a hospital confirmed Monday. The hospital said the singer died following a lengthy hospitalization, but did not give an exact cause of death. For many an iconic presence with a colorful dress sense - Roussos was once dubbed the Kaftan King - and rotund, bearded appearance, he enjoyed the respect of his colleagues and a steady global following. “He had a superb voice, he travelled in the world ... he loved what he was doing,” singer Nana Mouskouri told French radio RTL in a tribute. “He was an artist, a friend. I hope he is in a better world.” Artemis (shortened to Demis) Roussos was born in June 1946 in Alexandria, Egypt, which had a large Greek community. His formative years in the ancient port city’s cosmopolitan atmosphere were influenced by jazz, but also traditional Arab and Greek Orthodox music. The family moved in the early 1960s to Greece, where Roussos took music lessons and played in amateur groups. He first came to prominence in the late 1960s with the band Aphrodite’s Child, formed together with Vangelis Papathanassiou - the Greek composer best known by his first name whose score for the film “Chariots of Fire” won him an Oscar in 1982. His career launched, Roussos moved out of Greece to continue as a solo artist, recording hits such as “Forever and Ever,” ”My Friend The Wind,“ ”Velvet Mornings,“ ”Someday Somewhere,“ and ”Lovely Lady Of Arcadia.“ He listed Mozart and Sting among his favourite composers. In 1985, Roussos was among 153 people taken hostage when two Shiite Muslim militiamen hijacked a TWA Boeing 727 on a flight from Athens to Rome, and he spent his 39th birthday on the plane. He was released unharmed five days later, and at a press conference thanked his captors for giving him a birthday cake. Roussos enjoyed good food, which created problems with his weight that at one point reached 319 pounds (145 kilograms). He managed to reduce that by a third in nine months and went on to co-write a book about losing weight.
Kurt Stahl
was born on August 2, 1928 in Hattingen, Germany and passed away on January 25, 2015 in Trail. There will be an interment in the spring at the Salmo Cemetery.
SUBMITTED PHOTO
Kaj Raymond Bisgaard generously donated $25,000 to the KBRH Health Foundation in recognition of the exceptional care received for his wife and granddaughter. $10,000 was donated to the Columbia View Lodge Special Care Unit in memory of his granddaughter Belinda Ellen Hawkins. And $15,000 was dedicated to multiple departments at KBRH, in memory of his beloved wife Ellen Margrethe Bisgaard. Mr. Bisgaard made this donation as a token of his appreciation and to enhance health care at KBRH and CVL. Carol Schlender, Secretary KBRH Health Foundation, accepts this wonderful donation.
Sikh MP becomes unlikely champion of Holocaust remembrance
THE CANADIAN PRESS OTTAWA - A man in a blue turban stood among thousands in toques, fur hats and yarmulkes in Poland on Tuesday to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Tim Uppal was there as the head of the official Canadian delegation for the commemoration ceremony, a role in keeping with his post as Canada’s minister of state for multiculturalism. But Uppal has championed the importance of Holocaust remembrance for much longer, an unusual role for a Sikh member of Parliament from an Edmonton-area riding with only a few hundred Jews. “There is so much we can learn from what happened here,” he said over the phone from Krakow, Poland ahead of his visit to the camp where an estimated 1.1. million were killed during the Second World War. “And you can take those lessons and apply it to the present.” Toronto Conservative
MP Mark Adler lives those lessons daily; his father Abram survived internment at Auschwitz and made his home in Toronto. “My father passed on a kind of optimism - as bad as things can get, there are always sunnier things ahead,” he said in Ottawa on Tuesday. “You’ve just always got to be strong and make a positive difference.” Uppal’s connection predates his time in government. His wife Kiran Bhinder is one of the only non-Jews ever to take part in a trip called March of the Living, which takes teens through Holocaust sites in Europe and then on to Israel. Uppal was taken by the stories his wife shared of her experiences, including her relationship with survivors from the camps, and began to develop his own relationships with them. When he found himself with the opportunity in 2010 to bring a private member’s bill forward in the House of Commons, he was besieged with pitches. One stood out: Canada did
not have a national Holocaust monument. There had been attempts to pass similar legislation in the past. Former Liberal MP Susan Kadis, who is Jewish and represented the heavily Jewish riding of Thornhill, introduced a bill in 2008. Winnipeg MP Anita Neville, who is also Jewish, brought another one forward later that year. But it was Uppal’s bill that finally made it through. Construction on the monument is set to begin this year, funded by private donors and the federal government. Holocaust remembrance is not a faith-based cause, Uppal said. “I was doing something as a Canadian, this is something that affects us all,” he said. “It wasn’t because of anything of my own faith but this is something that I felt was important to us all as Canadians.” Uppal has become a fixture on the Jewish community lecture circuit, addressing crowds ranging from the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee
to groups of teens about to depart on March of the Living trips. He says he hopes to one day expose his own children, now 6, 4 and 2, to the story of what happened to the 11 million people who fell victim to the Nazi government’s racist policies. “It’s so important that we pass on this history to future generations,” he said. For Uppal, the issue of racism also hits closer to home. In September, he posted on Twitter about an incident he personally experienced at a tennis court. “A woman leaving the tennis court looked at me and my wife and said, ”Are they members? Why can’t they play in the day - they don’t have jobs,“ he wrote. What he takes away from these encounters is the need for more education, he says, which comes also from more attention to history and the lessons of events like the Holocaust. “It is important that we must learn from our history,”he said. “We must know who we are.”
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