Notre Dame Cathedral’s organ getting 4-year-long cleaning
Paris: Pipe by precious pipe, the organ that once thundered through Notre Dame Cathedral is being taken apart after last year’s devastating fire. The mammoth task of dismantling, cleaning and re-assembling France’s largest musical instrument started Monday and is expected to last nearly four years.
It will take six months just to tune the organ, and its music isn’t expected to resound again through the medieval Paris monument until 2024, according to the state agency overseeing Notre Dame’s restoration.
Amazingly, the 8,000-pipe organ survived the April 2019 fire that consumed the cathedral’s roof and toppled its spire. But the blaze coated the instrument in toxic lead dust that must now be painstakingly removed.
And while the organ didn’t burn, it did suffer damage from a record heatwave last summer and has been affected by other temperature variations it’s been exposed to since the 12th-century cathedral lost its roof, the agency said.
Experts stared removing the organ’s keyboards Monday and will then take out its pipes in a dismantling process that will last through the end of this year, according to the restoration agency.
The pieces will be placed in special containers inside the huge cathedral, where the cleaning and restoration will take place. The general who leads the agency said the organ, which dates from 1733, will next play again on April 16, 2024, marking five years since the fire. (AP)
Rosa Parks letter on Martin Luther King Jr. on sale for $54K
Washington: A handwritten letter written by Rosa Parks recalling Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s work in the civil rights movement is on sale for USD 54,000.
The letter, dated October 6, 1981, was sent to a Mr Kessler more than a decade after King’s assassination.
“I admired and respected him as a truly great man committed and dedicated to freedom, peace and equality for all oppressed humanity,” Parks writes about King in the letter. He was a leader of the masses in Montgomery, Alabama and the nation. Moments in Time CEO Gary Zimet, whose company is selling the letter, told AL.com it’s the only letter where he’s seen Parks mentioning King, and said it’s rare because it’s handwritten. Even her typed letters are scarce, Zimet said.
Parks was arrested after refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus in Montgomery on December 1, 1955. Her arrest sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement. The boycott turned King, who was a young minister, into a leader in the movement. (AP)
British woman avoids gallows, jailed for husband’s death
Alor Setar (Malaysia): A British woman accused of stabbing her husband to death at their Malaysian resort home avoided the gallows and was sentenced to 42 months in jail on Monday after she pleaded guilty to a lesser charge.
Lawyer Sangeet Kaur Deo said prosecutors reduced the murder charge against Samantha Jones, 51, to culpable homicide, which is murder without intent, after the defense appealed to the attorney-general’s office. A conviction for murder carries a mandatory death sentence by hanging. She is very relieved having come to terms with what happened that night and for the court … to understand what happened that night. She didn’t intend for this to happen,” the lawyer told reporters at the end of the hearing. In addition to the 42-month jail sentence, Kaur said Jones was also fined 10,000 ringgit ( 2,368).
Police have said Jones confessed she stabbed her husband in the chest during a heated argument. The lawyer said the couple, who had been married for 17 years, were devoted to each other but Jones was struggling with physical violence by her husband. (AP)