Dead Pool 28th April 2019

Welcome to the last newsletter for April, the general trend of the year is still with us, no amazing surprise deaths and still no points! 

Look Who You Could Have Had:

In Other News

A California prisoner is accused of beheading his cellmate in an attack officials described as “heinous”. Jaime Osuna allegedly mutilated, killed and beheaded Luis Romero at Corcoran State Prison on 9th March, in an overnight murder. Fuck knows what the other inmates and the guards were up to! Osuna is accused of removing several of Romero’s body parts with a sharp metal object which was wrapped in string and attached to a handle. Officials say it is unclear how long the victim remained alive during the torture. “We do believe that [Romero] was conscious during at least a portion of the time,” Phil Esbenshade, a district attorney, said. “This is the most gruesome case that I have seen in terms of heinousness in the slaying.” Prison guards found Romero’s body in his cell at around 7.30 am. An autopsy report concluded that the 44-year-old had bled to death after suffering “multiple sharp force trauma injuries”. Osuna was initially imprisoned in 2017, without the possibility of parole, after pleading guilty to killing a 37-year-old woman in a motel in 2011.   

More than 270 election staff have died in Indonesia, ten days after the country held the world’s biggest single-day vote, officials say. The workers have mostly died of fatigue-related illnesses caused by long hours spent counting millions of ballot papers by hand, according to one official. A further 1,878 workers involved in overseeing the ballot have fallen ill, Indonesia’s General Elections Commission (KPU) spokesperson said. Voting is still ongoing but concern is growing over the number of deaths. The country’s health ministry has also urged medical facilities to care for sick election staff. Indonesia’s elections commission has been criticised for its treatment of workers. The country held elections on 17th April, marking the first time it had combined a presidential ballot with national and regional parliamentary ones. Officials estimated that around 80 per cent of 193 million people participate. Each person cast up to five ballot papers in more than 800,000 polling stations across eight hours. If any of the Poolers have any idea how you can die from counting bits of paper, please send your answer on a postcard to the usual address…  

Last week we said farewell to Geoffrey Servante at the age of 99. I’d forgive you for not knowing who he was, however he was almost certainly the last surviving British member of the legendary International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War. Geoffrey joined the fight against General Franco’s fascist-backed rebellion in Spain in June 1937, 11 months after the outbreak of the war. As an 18-year-old merchant seaman, he jumped ship in Valencia and caught a train to the International Brigades’ main base in Albacete. Because he was not yet 21 he was refused admission into the British Battalion and was instead assigned to an Anglo-American artillery unit known as the John Brown Battery. Initially deployed in Extremadura in south-west Spain, the battery was transferred to the Toledo front south of Madrid in December 1937. There Geoffrey remained until the final months of the Spanish Civil War, which ended with Franco declaring victory in April 1939. Thanks to Millie for finding this one! 

On This Day

  • 1503 – The Battle of Cerignola is fought. It is noted as one of the first European battles in history won by small arms fire using gunpowder.
  • 1789 – Mutiny on the Bounty: Lieutenant William Bligh and 18 sailors are set adrift and the rebel crew returns to Tahiti briefly and then sets sail for Pitcairn Island.
  • 1869 – Chinese and Irish labourers for the Central Pacific Railroad working on the First Transcontinental Railroad lay ten miles of track in one day, a feat which has never been matched.
  • 1881 – Billy the Kid escapes from the Lincoln County jail in Mesilla, New Mexico.
  • 1945 – Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci are executed by a firing squad consisting of members of the Italian resistance movement.
  • 1988 – Near Maui, Hawaii, flight attendant Clarabelle “C.B.” Lansing is blown out of Aloha Airlines Flight 243, a Boeing 737, and falls to her death when part of the plane’s fuselage rips open in mid-flight.

Deaths

  • 1945 – Benito Mussolini, Italian journalist and politician, 27th Prime Minister of Italy (b. 1883)
  • 1992 – Francis Bacon, Irish painter (b. 1909)
  • 1999 – Alf Ramsey, English footballer and manager (b. 1920)

Last Week’s Birthdays

Jenna Coleman (33), Sheena Easton (60), Russell T. Davies (56), Pablo Schreiber (41), Channing Tatum (39), Giancarlo Esposito (61), Kevin James (54), Jet Li (56), Joan Chen (58), Melania Trump (49), Renée Zellweger (50), Al Pacino (79), Hank Azaria (55), Talia Shire (73), Gina Torres (50), William Roache (87), Rory McCann (50), Aidan Gillen (51), Djimon Hounsou (55), Barbra Streisand (77), Shirley MacLaine (85), Rebecca Mader (42), Richard Donner (89), Gemma Whelan (38), John Cena (42), John Hannah (57), Lee Majors (80), John Oliver (42), Amber Heard (33), Jeffrey Dean Morgan (53), Jack Nicholson (82), Sheryl Lee (52), and John Waters (73).

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