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Hello and welcome to the intelligence on economist radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Most weekdays we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Today though, we'll be looking back at some of the years most notable passings, the inspired and inspiring figures who died this year. I think 2020 has been a great surprise. And Rome is our obituaries editor. When I heard about the pandemic, I thought at first that there'd be so many candidates every week that I wouldn't know who to choose. And we'd have this awful business of not knowing who we should prioritize.
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Of course, there have been so many hundreds of 1000s of deaths. On the other hand, deaths of prominent people have not been, I'd say any more common than usual.
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One face though, that was not known to most people, but was extremely important was that of one of the first doctors to raise the alarm about COVID-19. And this was Li wenliang, who worked at the uhand Central Hospital.
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He was one of eight doctors who suddenly noticed something strange and put it up as a post on his way by account.
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He said he'd noticed a cluster of strange cases of pneumonia in patients who all seem to work at the Wu Han food market.
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404 :)
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But the damage was done. The post went viral, and he was called in by the police and accused of illegal activities and spreading rumors. And he was made to sign a form saying that he would not pursue his illegal activities any further and to dip his thumb into reading can sign with his mark that he was going to obey.
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And he went back to hospital feeling rather bruised about all this.
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His speciality in fact wasn't pulmonary diseases. It was ophthalmology. He was an eye doctor. And on January the eighth he treated an 82 year old woman who had been working to the we were had seafood market.
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A little while after treating her he began to cough and he realized that he had picked up the strange virus.
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404 :)
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Ironically, it really wasn't until he was in hospital and rather ill that he began to gain world attention. And many, many people came to interview him or interviewed him online rather because he was pretty soon in the intensive care unit. And he had an interview with The New York Times in which he still kept his own defiance and said he thought he was right to speak out. That truth had to be adhered to there had to be transparency, the government had to be honest with the people. He was a little bit of an agitator, underneath the white coat. And I think he felt as he was fighting for his life in the hospital, he still had to get his message out and tell everyone that this was a very serious disease and the Chinese government was covering up how serious it was.
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It's quite difficult to decide who do in a week I will usually have half a dozen names. What I do is I read through their stories. And it's almost as if a bell literally sounds in my head. And I think that is a great story. That's the person I'm going to do.
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Sometimes, of course, you know that they're famous anyway. And they demand to be done and my colleagues would expect me to do them, but it's not always the case.
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One person and wrote about this year
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hadn't been famous before his death. But afterwards, his name was being chanted across America and the world.
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George Floyd was working three jobs in Minneapolis. He was a truck driver. He was a security guard at a Latino club. And he was working on Tuesdays at the El Nuevo rodeo Club, which was built as the hottest Mexican venue in Minneapolis and drew great crowds of people to three floors of dancing and dining.
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He was there on Tuesdays because that was often the urban music night. And it was good to have a big genial presence like his on the door welcoming everybody, and not intimidating the crowd.
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He had come to Minneapolis from Houston several years before really because he wanted to get a job he'd been just to come North maybe get enough money to do a bit more for the women and children in his life still in Houston. And he found that jobs are plentiful that
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the main job George Floyd did in the city was to be a bouncer at the conga Latin Bistro. And there, he was a great favorite with all the regulars. They would love to come up and hug him Indeed, he would get quite cross with them. Apparently, if they didn't give him a hug. And he would eat meals with them drive them home if they were drunk. He was so got a new girlfriend and life was certainly looking up.
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As a result of that he thought that he would probably stay in Minnesota.
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He was torn because Houston was still home. And he'd been brought up there. After all, he'd been brought up in the Third Ward, which is almost entirely black. It's a very impoverished part of town. Lot of shotgun shacks and pretty rundown public housing. And he seems to have got drawn into crime.
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He got his first conviction for theft with a firearm in the 1980s. From then on, there were quite a string of arrests for low level drug offenses. And he just seemed not to quite be able to get on the straight path. But actually, in 2007, he got involved in his worst crime of all when he and five other men broke into a woman's house and he held a gun to stomach and then looked for drugs and money. They got him five years in prison.
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When he got out of jail he made as a resolution that he would start a completely new life. He was a member of a church called resurrection Houston, and he became very active in there he organized basketball games and barbecues, and Bible studies. So he was doing his best to turn his life around before he went to Minneapolis and his calls to his friends then were full of hopes for the future.
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But by this spring, things that got a lot cloudier.
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The pandemic struck him rather hard because both the restaurants where he was working, were closed down, obviously, because of the virus. Things were not yet desperate. But then they seem to take a difficult turn and he found himself in trouble with the police again. And that was on the fateful night, the night of the 25th of May.
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On that evening, he went with two acquaintances to cut foods to buy cigarettes. And they're one of them tried to pay with a $20 bill which the store clerk thought looked counterfeit. And they went out of the store and then George Floyd came back in with same $20 bill and we still don't know no one seems to know whether it was actually counterfeit, but the counter cloud called 911, and the squad cars all turned up.
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And they got ahold of john Floyd who'd actually gone out of the store at that stage. And they tried to handcuff him at first he resisted arrest. They managed to get the cuffs on him and then he became very calm and quiet. They tried to help him into the squad car. He said he was claustrophobic didn't want to get in there. And at that point, he was shoved to the ground. And an officer sat on his neck and pressed on his neck for almost nine minutes.
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Meanwhile, he was crying out for his mother and crying out he couldn't breathe, and that his neck had his stomach heard that the officers showed no compassion whatsoever until he was quite unconscious until he was quite limp. In fact, he was limped three minutes before the officer got up. And the terrible irony in this whole story is that the officer who did this outrageous and horrible thing, Derrick Shaaban had been working with him, whether he knew it or not, at the El Nuevo dam on Tuesday night.
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We choose to go to that mode and this decade and do the other thing, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills. At the start of the 1960s, America began a dramatic expansion of its space program. It would require the finest minds solving the thorniest problems in physics, Computing and Engineering. Among them was Catherine Johnson.
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She had joined the outfit at NASA, because exceptionally they were taking on black mathematicians. But normally it was extremely difficult to get into professional work. And so she was a rarity. She'd only been two weeks in the job and the all male Flight Research Unit, when an engineer came up to her with a sheaf of papers, and asked her to check his calculations. And she realized that there was an error involving a square root. Increasingly, she was given all the equations and calculations that the men had to make, check the mover. She was still working there. It is an extremely segregated and misogynistic environment. It was segregated because she couldn't eat in the cafe.
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And then increasingly, the flight engineers were having closed door meetings where they were discussing the aeronautics of spacecraft. And she was not allowed in there. And she asked why. They said the girls don't usually go. She said, why not? Is there a law against it? They said no, and they had to let her in. So she became the first woman who attended those meetings.
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her greatest achievements at NASA were all to do with the early days of America's journeys into space.
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The first flight she helped good deal with was Alan Shepards, which was the first American manned flight
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to go 1.2 G. Kevin at 14.
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She made sure not only that the launch window was in the right place, but also that he could get back safely to earth because that was always the main problem. Once the flight became manned. You had to get your people back safely.
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The next one was john glenn, this was in 1962. He was the first American to orbit the Earth.
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And he was extremely worried before his flight because at that time, they had just brought in electronic computers to NASA.
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It was this electronic computer that was supposed to be calculating all the trajectories of his spacecraft to and from and round the earth. He didn't trust it. And he said to the people at NASA,
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unless the girl checks it, and this was Catherine Johnson. I wouldn't go
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back in 1800 feet in beautiful suit. Looks good. On oh two emergency and that looks very good.
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Every year 1000s of tourists visit the El Rosario butterfly sanctuary in
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Mexico at the sanctuary and its staff have long been under threat.
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The migration of monarch butterflies is one of the great wonders of the natural world.
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They fly 4500 kilometers from Eastern Canada right down to Mexico. And they do this every year. They start in late August, and make their way down to arrive in Mexico at the very beginning of November. There are millions of these butterflies and the color is bright orange tending to yellow. Suddenly there they are coming clouds over the western part of Mexico.
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The man who probably welcomed the most eagerly to a little place called El Rosario in the middle of Michoacan was America Gomez.
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He was the manager of the El Rosario butterfly sanctuary. And he would watch for these butterflies for days before
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he was an intrepid tweeter. So he would send out to all his followers, pictures of him pictures of the sky and the trees film of it just waiting for that first little wind to come flickering across that's not as
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much as he has. And then picture after picture would come and film after film of him standing in forest clearings with his arms out welcoming the butterflies and they would land on him they land on his head and his nose and his shoulders.
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And flock to the tree is so many of them that the branches were actually weighed down and the leaves would look orange with them.
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For some time, he'd been receiving death threats. There have been various 10th standoffs with the illegal loggers
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who despite the fact that logging have been banned in the sanctuary for some time by the national government still managed to come in. It was still very lucrative to take the trees out there are some quite valuable hardwoods that grow in among the the special pine trees that the monarch butterflies love. So these were the new enemies, they were armed, he had to try and keep a constant watch on them. So he organized the trolls keeping a watch out for intruders. So there was not a great deal of surprise when he went missing. His body was found floating and sort of farm reservoir.
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And it seemed at first that it was just a death by drowning. And that was what the authorities said but a better autopsy revealed that he'd had a blow to the head.
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One of the things that most drew me to write this a bee tree was the contrast between the fragility and beauty of the butterflies, which had so attracted Romero Gomez, and the apparent horror and violence of the way he died.
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In Britain this year, a woman died after 80 years of embodying the national spirit.
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Very living used to go and choose her music in the shops in Denmark Street, which is where the music dealers and companies are. The interesting thing about her is that she couldn't read music. So when she picked up a score and looked at it, all she judged it by was the words
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she would see if the lyrics moved her. And if she felt they were sentimental enough, then that was a song for her. And she found some good ones White Cliffs of Dover, we'll meet again they'll always be in England
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always be Angolan. While there's our country lady.
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She found she could move people to tears. And she became extremely famous during the second world war with her program called Sincerely yours on the BBC.
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Dear boys, I've been working in the West End all this week. And using the tubes and buses a lot. I realized how well some of the girls are doing your job while you're away. And when she sang 1000s of people tuned in and listened to her and were moved by her and she became a huge rave
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gave a celebrity. It was really said that she won the war single handed all by herself.
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The postwar years were quite difficult in Britain, we had won the war, but the country was tired, weary. And the memories of the war and the spirited kindled were extremely important. And people felt they could rekindle a feeling of national pride and purpose by talking about the war again. So of course, that meant keeping various songs very much to the forefront. And she was aware of that too, and felt that she had to keep the national morale going. Even if the country wasn't at war, they'll never forget that period. And the song seemed to be somehow part of it. And if it still means that much to them, and they're entertained by them, who am I to stop singing, and she went on seeing them as long as her voice would let her when she came to embody Britain, and especially Britain during the COVID crisis. It seemed particularly poignant that she died at the ripe old age of 103. Just as we were coming out of lockdown in a year where her voice had, again been the voice of comfort and uplift for a whole population as it was in the war.
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I'm Veera Lin, who died this year. We also heard about the lives of Li wenliang George Floyd, Katherine Johnson, and omero Gomez.
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That's all for this episode of the intelligence. We will be taking a couple of hard one days off. So happy holidays and see you back here on Monday.