Although it isn't structured any differently from dozens of other cradle-to-grave documentaries about artistic luminaries, "Luther: Never Too Much" sheds light on much more than just the life and career of R&B singer Luther Vandross. Drawn largely from interview and performance footage of Vandross over his almost 40 years in entertainment, and bolstered and contextualized by retrospective talks will collaborators and confidantes, director Dawn Porter's film exposes some uneasy truths about the music industry and the media we may now know, but whose seeming ubiquitousness at the time he was alive may be difficult to fully comprehend.
As a chubby teen-ager growing up in the Alfred E. Smith housing project on the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge, he listened carefully, intensely to an older sister who sang backup for the Crests ("16 Candles"), to such black divas as Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin and Diana Ross. Vandross didn't care much for sports or street activities, outside of corner harmonies; a year in college was spent spinning Franklin albums in the student lounge -- not a higher learning, perhaps, but a deeper one.
Now 31, he's spent 20 years listening, and the last eight moving out of the shadows. He has little difficulty pinpointing "who lit my musical fire, who aroused my musical libido. The person single-handedly responsible for me making a decision to pursue artistic things was Dionne Warwick. It was at the Brooklyn Fox Theatre in 1963 he'd actually gone to see the Shirelles . She came on stage and just killed me; the music was more serious, the song value was more serious. 'Anyone Who Has a Heart' was a masterpiece. I decided at that point that I wanted to do something in music."
Here's what Luther Vandross has done in music, so far: His self-produced 1981 debut, "Never Too Much," oozed with an invigorating update of the classic emotional singing of '60s soul; it went platinum and established Vandross as the most distinctive new singer in a decade.
His first outside album production was Cheryl Lynn's "Instant Love," which yielded a No. 1 single. His second effort was Aretha Franklin's "Jump to It"; it returned a fired-up Queen of Soul to No. 1 on the black charts, a position she had not held for many years.
His own already-gold follow-up, "Forever, For Always, For Love," chock-full of exuberant and sensual declamations of love and desire, has just raced into the chart position recently vacated by Franklin.
Dionne Warwick, dressed in a black and white polka-dot dress, noted the variety of performers who had sang with Mr. Vandross.
"Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, Whitney Houston," she said, then paused and shimmied her shoulders. "And me."
Closing with C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
Most of the casualties were women and children, the ministry said, and thousands more bodies were likely to remain uncounted under rubble across Gaza.
Speaking at a global summit in the Ugandan capital of Kampala, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, denounced Israel’s three-month assault.
“Israel’s military operations have spread mass destruction and killed civilians on a scale unprecedented during my time as secretary general,” Guterres said at the opening of the G77+China, a coalition of 135 developing countries.
“This is heartbreaking and utterly unacceptable. The Middle East is a tinderbox. We must do all we can to prevent conflict from igniting across the region.”
This morning, Clea Caulcutt (POLITICO) reports:
Only a trickle of patients and their relatives, a couple of dozens every day, are let through at the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, where they are screened by Israeli, Palestinian and Egyptian authorities. Only men who have suffered severe and life-changing injuries are allowed out.
Yazan is one of the few Palestinians who have been able to evacuate after suffering injuries in Israel’s bombing campaign launched after Hamas’ attacks against Israel on October 7. After weeks lying on a stretcher in overcrowded hospitals, Yazan left Gaza via Rafah alongside his aunt and his 4-year-old cousin who was suffering from severe diarrhea after sheltering for days in an overcrowded school.
Reiterating urgent international calls for a ceasefire, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reported that there have been nearly 20,000 births since the start of widespread Israeli bombardment in response to Hamas-led attacks in Israel that left some 1,200 dead and approximately 250 taken hostage.
Chronic aid access problems have meant that Caesarean sections have been performed without anaesthetic while other women have been unable to deliver their stillborn babies because medical staff are overwhelmed, the UN agency said.
“Mothers face unimaginable challenges in accessing adequate medical care, nutrition and protection before, during and after giving birth,” said UNICEF Communications Specialist Tess Ingram.
“Becoming a mother should be a time for celebration. In Gaza, it's another child delivered into hell.”
Echoing deep concerns about the deteriorating humanitarian situation, UN World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus expressed alarm that hepatitis A infections had been confirmed in Gaza.
“The inhumane living conditions – barely any clean water, clean toilets and possibility to keep the surroundings clean – will enable hepatitis A to spread further and highlight how explosively dangerous the environment is for the spread of disease,” Tedros tweeted on X, formerly Twitter, on Thursday.
The latest WHO data indicates that on average 500 people are sharing one toilet, and over 2,000 people have to use a single shower, increasing the risk of disease spread.
In addition to a sharp rise in upper respiratory infections, diarrhoea cases among children under age five recorded during the last three months of 2023 were 26 times higher than reports from the same period in 2022, the UN health agency noted.
Pediatric doctors told NBC News yesterday that they were concerned about the spread of the Hepatitis C virus and other diseases among young children in southern Gaza.
“We are seeing many cases of Hepatitis C,” Dr. Bessam Hamouda said as he treated patients in the children’s ward of Rafah's El Najar Hospital.
“It spreads in the packed and the difficult conditions the Palestinian people are in, displaced, tents and the big number of children and the pollution around them. This is a virus which contaminates children in particular,” he added.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
Israeli forces are pushing further into southern Gaza, with airstrikes and ground troops attacking areas that Israel had previously told Palestinians to flee to as safe zones. Over the past few days, Israel has bombed areas close to Nasser Hospital, the largest remaining semi-functioning health facility in Gaza, located in the southern city of Khan Younis. Gaza only has 16 partially functioning health facilities remaining. Before Israel’s assault, Gaza had 36 hospitals. The hospitals that are still working are operating far beyond their capacity, have been turned into makeshift refugee camps to house the displaced — and makeshift morgues — with health officials describing the situation as catastrophic. The Health Ministry estimates that over 60,000 people have been wounded in Gaza, with hundreds more casualties every day. The casualty count at this point is nearing 25,000, more than 10,000 of them children.
For more, we’re joined by Dr. James Smith, an emergency medical doctor who just returned from Gaza earlier this month, where he worked alongside Palestinian healthcare workers to treat patients at Al-Aqsa Hospital located in Deir al-Balah in the middle of the Gaza Strip. Dr. James was in Gaza with the organization Medical Aid for Palestinians. He’s joining us now from London.
Dr. James, welcome to Democracy Now! Describe what you saw, what you confronted, the work you were doing, what’s happening at Al-Aqsa Hospital.
DR. JAMES SMITH: Hi, Amy.
So, yes, as you say, I was working with a team. There were 10 of us. Myself, I was with the organization Medical Aid for Palestinians. We were accompanied by colleagues from the International Rescue Committee. And very importantly, we were — it’s important to really reiterate that we were working with our Palestinian colleagues, so doctors, nurses, other healthcare professionals, at Al — sorry, at Al-Aqsa Hospital. Al-Aqsa is a hospital based in the middle area of Gaza, so south of Gaza City and north of Khan Younis.
Myself, I was working in the emergency room. So, we would position ourselves in the ER every morning and, really, at that point, wait to see what the day would bring. Every single day, without exception, there were multiple mass casualty incidents at the hospital. So that’s several patients presenting at a time with traumatic injuries of varying severity. Those patients would require stabilization and then often transfer through to the operating room for surgical intervention. Some patients would require palliative care, if we were able to provide some form of palliative care, and in addition to many, many trauma patients. And by “many,” I mean several hundred over the time that we were working at Al-Aqsa. We were also treating patients presenting with complex medical problems, so people that had suffered heart attacks, for example, had suffered from strokes, and people whose hypertension or diabetes management had been negatively impacted, usually through a lack of access to their usual medication or because they hadn’t been able to see their usual doctor for several months. And then, furthermore, we were also seeing an even greater number of people with, effectively, primary healthcare-level problems.
So, the entirety of the primary healthcare or community care system in Gaza has completely collapsed. In fact, the entire healthcare system, the Ministry of Health has already announced several months ago, has completely collapsed. But that meant that anyone presenting with so-called, well, more minor complaints — coughs, colds, diarrheal illnesses — they were all also presenting to the emergency room to be seen by the doctors and nurses there.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about treating children, Dr. James?
DR. JAMES SMITH: Sure. So, as you’ve mentioned, a significant proportion of the people that have been killed since the start of this escalation are children. We certainly saw every mass casualty incident in the emergency room. There were several children also present. I remember very vividly some of the most traumatic injuries inflicted upon people were inflicted upon children. And they would include open chest wounds, open abdominal wounds, traumatic amputations, severe full-thickness burns to a substantial proportion of the body area — really some of the most horrific traumatic injuries that I have ever seen.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re actually showing images for our TV audience of Al-Aqsa Hospital and of the children and the adults who have been wounded there. You know, it’s really important to point out, if you’re talking about a hospital in normal times that has repeatedly been attacked, it would — and that’s severely compromised in its functioning, but we’re talking about this constant bombardment, where you have people coming in who have been severely wounded. You have people taking refuge there. And is it both like a refugee camp and a morgue?
DR. JAMES SMITH: So, there were several thousand people that had sought supposed sanctuary within the hospital compound itself. And we’ve seen this in several other hospitals across the Gaza Strip. There were reports, for example, of thousands of people sheltering in the Al-Shifa compound before that was surrounded and raided by the Israeli occupation forces. The same was the case at Al-Aqsa. So there were people staying in makeshift tents in and around the hospital buildings. Just up the main street adjacent to the hospital, sort of another IDP camp, internally displaced persons camp, had sort of formed very organically on open land. As the Israeli ground forces moved closer to the hospital and as the bombardment, the artillery and air bombardment, intensified, many of those — many thousands of those displaced people have displaced further south towards Rafah. And that also includes patients who were in the hospital at the time that we were working there. Many of them have also fled, along with many of the staff, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to a clip, and it’s really important to play these clips. Right now Gaza has experienced the longest communications blackout of this Israeli attack for the last three months. I think it’s something like seven days. So it’s really hard to get information inside this intense Israeli bombardment in the vicinity of Nasser Hospital, the main hospital in Khan Younis, the largest remaining semi-functioning health facility in Gaza, and tanks and armored vehicles are on the main road leading to the area. On Wednesday, Democracy Now! reached Dr. Ahmed Moghrabi, who works in Nasser Hospital. He described the situation on the ground and the difficulty in getting out any messages. This is what he had to say.
DR. AHMED MOGHRABI: Thank you, sister, for asking about us. Thank you for letting me speak out here. We don’t have internet at all. I managed to get a very weak signal. I can’t upload any of these videos. Here, 90% of people who are already evacuated at the hospital, they evacuated from the hospital. Ninety percent of medical personnel evacuated from the hospital.
And this is my little daughter, actually. She got head trauma Saturday. You know, hundreds of these evacuating people at the corridor, somebody pushed her, and she fell on her head. Now I’m taking care about my — this little girl. She needs medicine. She’s not well. So I stay at the hospital now, but I want to evacuate. The situation is catastrophic, sister. Really, I’m very tired. I’m very tired.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Dr. Ahmed Moghrabi, and the image we’ve been showing as he spoke was Dr. Moghrabi holding his own wounded daughter. I’m wondering, Dr. James, if you can talk about the significance, the medical significance, of a complete — almost complete telecommunications blackout, in terms of ambulances being reached, people being able to communicate to get help.
DR. JAMES SMITH: Absolutely. I mean, this is a catastrophic development. As you’ve mentioned, Amy, this, I think, is the seventh time that the Israelis have suspended access to telecommunications across almost the entirety of the Gaza Strip. This is now day six or seven of a complete sort of telecommunications blackout. It makes it almost impossible to do anything.
So, in the first instance, people can’t reach their families, their loved ones. They can’t communicate with colleagues. They can’t reassure family that they’re OK, or indeed relatives and friends can’t inform family members and so on when somebody has been killed or injured. There have been occasions where the emergency number has not been in use. So, as you say, it’s been difficult to call ambulances or mobilize ambulances to places where there has been an air or artillery strike. It makes it very difficult for health and humanitarian workers to do their essential work —
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Smith, we —
DR. JAMES SMITH: — so they can’t coordinate with each other.
AMY GOODMAN: We only have 10 seconds. What message do you have for the world, just having come out of Gaza? Ten seconds.
DR. JAMES SMITH: The violence needs to end immediately.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. James Smith, emergency medical doctor, just back from Gaza, where he worked to treat patients at Al-Aqsa Hospital.
That does it for our show. Democracy Now! has job openings. Check democracynow.org.
A Palestinian-American teenager was shot and killed Friday by Israeli troops in the West Bank, Palestinian officials told Reuters.
The 17-year-old boy was shot during clashes with Israeli forces, the victim's uncle told Reuters.
A State Department spokesperson would only confirm to CBS News that a U.S. citizen had died in the West Bank, adding that "we are working to understand the circumstances of the incident and have asked the government of Israel for further information."
According to Wafa, the Palestinian National Authority's official news agency, the boy was shot in the head. Wafa identified him as Tawfiq Ajjaq.
Celebrated UK-based Palestinian writer and director Ahmed Masoud lost his brother in Gaza after he was hit by an Israeli air strike.
“I knew I was going to write a post like this, I knew I wouldn’t find the words,” Masoud, who grew up in Gaza and later moved to the United Kingdom, wrote on X.
He showed earlier this month how his brother Khalid’s home was almost entirely destroyed after being targeted by an Israeli air strike as drones buzzed in the background. Then, his brother was shot by an Israeli sniper in the leg.
“A few days ago he went missing. A drone bombed, he lost his leg and bled for three days. My brother and friend is gone.”
ALJAZEERA notes that professors have been murdered:
Israel has killed 94 university professors, hundreds of teachers and thousands of students during its war in Gaza, a rights group has said.
The Israeli military has targeted academics and intellectuals “in deliberate and specific air raids” on their homes without prior warning, the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor said in a statement on Saturday.
These figures appear to have been targeted with “no justification or clear reason”, the monitor said.
“The targeted academics studied and taught across a variety of academic disciplines, and many of their ideas served as cornerstones of academic research in the Gaza Strip’s universities,” the Geneva, Switzerland-based group said.
In related news, Miriam Berger and Hazem Balousha (WASHINGTON POST) report:
The Israeli military says it is reviewing the decision to destroy the main building of Gaza’s Israa University in what appears to have been a planned explosion.
In a widely viewed video geolocated by The Washington Post, a camera apparently attached to a drone shows the sprawling building outside of Gaza City implode, demolishing the educational complex and engulfing the area in smoke.
The university shared news of the explosion of building, which housed its graduate and undergraduate studies, Wednesday.
Israa University Vice President Alaa Matar told The Washington Post that he could not confirm the date of the blast: Israeli forces, he said, had been occupying the campus for about 70 days, and Palestinians could not safely access the area. Matar spoke by phone from the southern city of Rafah, where more than half of Palestinians in Gaza have fled.
Satellite imagery of the area, assessed by The Post, showed the building intact on Jan. 13 and destroyed the next day. Most cellular and other communications had been unusable in the Gaza Strip for more than a week, from Jan. 12 until Friday evening.
The Israel Defense Forces' detonation of more than 300 mines planted at Israa University in Gaza on Wednesday provided the latest evidence that Israel's objective in its bombardment of the enclave is not self-defense, rights advocates said.
"This is not self-defense," said Chris Hazzard, an Irish member of the United Kingdom's Parliament. "This is not counter-insurgency. This is ethnic-cleansing."
The International Middle East Media Center (IMEMC) called the destruction of Israa University Israel's latest attempt to carry out a "cultural genocide" along with the slaughter of at least 24,620 people in just over three months—people who Israeli officials have claimed are legitimate military targets despite the fact that roughly half of those killed have been children.
The wiping out of cultural landmarks was included in South Africa's International Court of Justice case accusing Israel of genocidal acts in Gaza last week, with the complaint noting that "Israel has damaged and destroyed numerous centers of Palestinian learning and culture," including libraries, one of the world's oldest Christian monasteries, and the Great Omari Mosque, where an ancient collection of manuscripts was kept before the building was destroyed in an airstrike last month.
"The crime of targeting and destroying archaeological sites should spur the world and UNESCO into action to preserve this great civilizational and cultural heritage," Gaza's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said after the mosque was bombed.
Phillippe Lazzarini is the Commissioner General for UNRWA - the UN agency with specific responsibility for Palestinian refugees. He's just returned from his fourth visit to Gaza since the start of the war.
"There are today more than half a million children in the primary and secondary school system. How will they go back if you cannot bring people back to their homes which have been completely destroyed," Mr Lazzarini tells me.
"And I'm afraid that we're running the risk here of losing a generation of children."
Images of Israeli troops cheering as educational institutions were blown up went viral on social media, including one showing the complete demolition of a distinctive blue UN school in northern Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday that he “will not compromise on full Israeli control” over Gaza and that “this is contrary to a Palestinian state,” rejecting U.S. President Joe Biden’s suggestion that creative solutions could bridge wide gaps between the leaders' views on Palestinian statehood.
In a sign of the pressures Netanyahu’s government faces at home, thousands of Israelis protested in Tel Aviv calling for new elections, and others demonstrated outside the prime minister’s house, joining families of the more than 100 remaining hostages held by Hamas and other militants. They fear that Israel's military activity further endangers hostages' lives.
