FYI December 15, 2019

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On This Day

1970 – Soviet spacecraft Venera 7 successfully lands on Venus. It is the first successful soft landing on another planet.
Venera 7 (Russian: Венера-7, meaning Venus 7) was a Soviet spacecraft, part of the Venera series of probes to Venus. When it landed on the Venusian surface, it became the first spacecraft to soft land on another planet and first to transmit data from there back to Earth.[1][2]

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Born On This Day

1886 – Wanda Krahelska-Filipowicz, Polish politician and resistance fighter (d. 1968)[1]
Wanda Krahelska-Filipowicz (15 December, 1886–1968)[1], code name “Alinka””[2] or “Alicja”, was a leading figure in Warsaw’s underground resistance movement[3] throughout the years of German occupation during World War II in Poland, co-founder of Żegota.[4] As the well-connected wife of a former ambassador to Washington, she used her contacts with both the military and political leadership of the Polish Underground to materially influence the underground’s policy of aiding Poland’s Jewish population during the war.

Early on, Krahelska-Filipowicz used her influence to persuade the Government in Exile, including members of the Delegatura and its military counterpart, the AK, of the importance of setting up a central organization to help Poland’s Jews, and to back the policy with significant funding.[5]

Krahelska-Filipowicz also personally sheltered Jewish individuals in her own home early during the German occupation.[6] Among the refugees was the widow of the Jewish historian Szymon Aszkenazy.[7]

A Catholic Socialist activist and a devout Democrat, she was the editor of the Polish art magazine “Arkady”.

In the pre-World War I partitioned Poland, on 18 August 1906, at the age of twenty she took part in an assassination attempt on the Russian governor-general of Warsaw, Georgi Skalon.[8] She threw three ‘dynamite bombs’ on the governor’s coach; two did explode and slightly injured three persons in governor’s entourage. Afterwards, she fled to Cracow in Austrian part of Poland, entered into fictional marriage with painter Adam Dobrodzicki and became citizen of Austria-Hungary. Austria refused to extradite her to Russia and instead arranged a trial in Wadowice, starting on 16 February 1908. Wanda Dobrodzicka had confessed but was acquitted.

 
 

FYI

By Anita Gates, The New York Times: Anna Karina, Star of French New Wave Cinema, Is Dead at 79 Best known for her work with Jean-Luc Godard, she also appeared in films by Visconti, Fassbinder and others, as well as pursuing a singing career and writing four novels

Anna Karina (born Hanne Karin Bayer,[1] 22 September 1940 – 14 December 2019)[2] was a Danish-French film actress, director, writer, and singer. She rose to prominence as French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard’s muse in the 1960s,[3] performing in several of his films, including The Little Soldier (1960), A Woman Is a Woman (1961), Vivre sa vie (1962), Band of Outsiders (1964), and Pierrot le Fou and Alphaville (both 1965). For her performance in A Woman Is a Woman, Karina won the Silver Bear Award for Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival.[4]

In 1972, Karina set up a production company for her directorial debut, Vivre ensemble (1973), which screened in the Critics’ Week lineup at the 26th Cannes Film Festival.[5] She also directed the French-Canadian film Victoria (2008). In addition to her work in cinema, she worked as a singer, and wrote several novels in French.[6]

Karina was widely considered an icon of 1960s cinema.[7][8] The New York Times described her as “one of the screen’s great beauties and an enduring symbol of the French New Wave.”[9]

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Ideas

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Recipes

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