Tony Bennett, the legendary crooner of American music standards, has passed away at the age of 96, leaving a profound impact on the music world and the city he loved so much, San Francisco, according to AP News. Bennett’s illustrious career spanned seven decades, during which he left an indelible mark on the music world with his signature style and grace.

Bennett’s devotion to American song led to the creation of new standards, including his most famous song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” which won him two Grammy Awards and became the city’s unofficial anthem. The passionate singer’s connection to the city was eternal, and his contributions to its art and culture left a lasting impression, evoking mixed feelings in San Francisco on the day of his death.

Born in Astoria, Queens, the man once named Anthony Dominick Benedetto became the last of the great saloon singers of the mid-20th century. As he navigated the ever-changing musical landscape, Bennett has demonstrated resilience and adaptability, collaborating with musicians of diverse generations and backgrounds.

Bennett went beyond the traditional pop and jazz worlds and engaged in collaborations with contemporary artists such as Lady Gaga, Amy Winehouse and Carrie Underwood. His dedication to bringing the Great American Songbook to new audiences led to several successful albums and proved that old and new can effortlessly coexist and thrive together.

San Francisco holds a special place in Tony Bennett’s heart, symbolized by the statue of Bennett unveiled in 2016 at the Fairmont Hotel, where he first sang “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” in 1961. Through the decades, Bennett continued his tradition of loving the city and, at the age of 90, returned to perform and celebrate in his honor. Today, San Francisco mourns the loss of the voice that so perfectly captured the essence of the city.

Following news of his death, Breed, Mayor of San Francisco London, expressed the city’s gratitude for Bennett’s contributions, stating, “Tony Bennett has provided us with a song, a spirit and a magic that is connected to the history of this city and those who we are is connected.” Breed added that Bennett’s affinity for San Francisco “will stay with us forever.”

From the day he sang “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” at the Fairmont Hotel, Tony Bennett has embodied the love for this city shared by all San Franciscans throughout the decades since. Today we honor his memory and celebrate his legacy that will stay with us forever. pic.twitter.com/lHzO1O9LN9

— London Breed (@LondonBreed) July 21, 2023

Even the famous Fog of San Francisco paid tribute to Bennett. Popular Twitter account @KarlTheFog mourned Bennett’s death, saying: “ RIP Tony Bennett. Thank you for the city anthem. Our golden sun shines for you today.”

As the sun sets on the life of a legend, the people of San Francisco and beyond will forever cherish the memories and tunes Tony Bennett gave us. May his golden voice continue to reverberate through the hills of his favorite city, reminding us all of the magic and spirit that bound them so beautifully.

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See how drugs, homelessness and crime have transformed a city and what is being done about it. CNN’s Sara Sidner Asks, “What Happened to San Francisco?” on “The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper,” Sunday at 8 p.m. ET.

Tanya Tilghman moved to the Bay Area as a teenager to live with her mother. She later married, had two sons, and made a home in San Francisco’s historic Italian neighborhood of North Beach, above the tourist and financial centers.

Even when her marriage fell apart, she never considered leaving. This was her city, her people. Liberal like her, with a mix of income levels and an overall sense of community. She wasn’t worried about her growing boys taking to the streets, where she herself always felt safe.

But those streets have changed, she says. She believes actions by city hall and even groups helping the homeless have exacerbated some of the problems and the community she once felt a part of has disappeared, she says. And her son got caught up in a scene that’s hard to ignore in the city: the drug scene.

CNN

Tanya Tilghman says prison and rehab could finally help her son.

Tilghman said Roman Vardanega first tried illegal drugs early in high school when he took a prescription drug at a friend’s house.

He quickly became addicted, his mother said, and then switched to cocaine, heroin, and later fentanyl, all of which were available in the city’s seedy Tenderloin area.

Tilghman admits she was uninformed, even naïve, about the proliferation of hard drugs. But it wasn’t something she encountered every day. Then “I think it’s a lot worse now than it was when I was growing up here,” she said. “When I was a teenager we always came to the Tenderloin because we thought it was just fun and quirky and I never felt insecure as a teenager. But I also don’t remember people coming up to me and asking if I wanted to buy drugs.”

One of her first clues that her son was deeply involved was when she accompanied him on a tour of City Hall while he was at school. It was a few blocks from the Tenderloin, and some of the homeless people on the street knew him by name, like he’d been out there hanging out with them a lot — and that’s exactly what he did by collecting his drugs.

She tried to help. Vardanega spent 11th grade in rehab but persuaded his mother to let him return. She welcomed him home, but so did the streets.

Courtesy of Tanya Tilghman

Roman Vardanega showed musical talent from a young age, his mother said, before his addiction consumed him.

By this time, their neighborhood had changed, and drugs seemed freely available even when they rode the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system home.

“The first thing I got out of the BART station was asked if I wanted to buy some medication,” Tilghman said. The ease of getting and using drugs made the city a dangerous and sometimes deadly playground for people like her son.

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Vardanega began living on the streets full-time. The city was shut down, residents left or stayed indoors, and at the height of the pandemic, more people died from drug overdoses than from Covid-19.

“Everyone in town started putting up tents,” Tilghman said. “The open air drug market has gotten a lot worse. And so it became easier for him to buy drugs and use them outdoors.”

And what Tilghman found puzzling was that the city just seemed to be looking the other way.

“The city’s policies absolutely harmed my son, it harmed us, and it caused him, I would say, to fall into his addiction a lot more,” she said.

“If you get caught for drugs, you most likely won’t go to jail, the cops would just let you go,” she said. “That made the situation even worse, especially for my son because he’s very young and he’s still in that party mood.”

Tilghman’s state of mind was focused on one goal: finding her son. She knew he was addicted. She knew she loved him so much it hurt. And she knew that she wouldn’t stop looking until she found him, even if it put her in danger.

She walked the streets looking at things that most people tried to avoid and looked straight into the eyes of the people who lived on the streets. Sometimes she got blank looks back. Sometimes a sympathetic ear or a hopeful hint as to where her son might be.

She didn’t find him, but so many people were like him. “What makes me sad is seeing my son’s face on everyone’s faces … out on the street,” Tilghman said.

When Covid broke out, many residents started disappearing and the tent cities exploded on the sidewalks along with the drugs, the addictions and the signs of mental illness.

Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images

In May 2020, rectangles are painted on the ground at a city-sanctioned homeless camp across from City Hall in San Francisco to encourage the homeless to practice social distancing.

Mayor London Breed declared a state of emergency in the city to set up a “liaison center” at the Tenderloin, touted as a place for addicts to seek services that can help them.

When it opened in January 2022, Tilghman hoped it might be a place her son would find himself in, and one day she went to have a look. When she got there, she heard blaring music and tried to peek inside.

“I saw people doing drugs. I could not believe it. I think this is a place where people should get help. And they actually do drugs?” Tilghman said.

A little later she pretended to be an addict and went to the center to take a closer look.

“I told them I wanted to quit drugs and that I needed help,” she said. “And they laughed at me. And the guy at the door said, “We can help you get off drugs.” “But if you need help getting off drugs, you have to come back tomorrow,” Tilghman said.

The center had an area intended to treat overdoses, but it became known as a place for taking drugs and not for other services.

“The most disturbing thing… was that the damage reduction area was more like a party scene,” Tilghman said. “If my son went there to access services because he’s a drug addict, if he saw a party scene where people were dancing and singing and taking drugs and most likely selling drugs there, there just wouldn’t be an option for him to access it.” Services. Because he was so distracted and so excited that he went and used it.”

In her opinion, the city’s laissez-faire philosophy had simply gone too far.

“If you walk into a store and steal less than $1,000 worth of merchandise and get away with it, that’s going way too far,” she said. “It’s going too far when you could smoke crack in front of a cop and the cop just looks at you and doesn’t even arrest you.”

The struggle to save her son was wearing her down. Not once, but three times, Tilghman says she was so depressed and so hopeless that she attempted suicide.

The situation is beginning to change, both for Tilghman personally and perhaps for her town.

The Tenderloin Linkage Center, later renamed the Tenderloin Center, closed last December. Tilghman has found new support and a mission working with Mothers Against Drug Addiction and Deaths. A new district attorney took office after the previous one was removed by constituents who perceived him as soft-spoken about crime. Tilghman’s son Vardanega got into trouble with the law, served a prison sentence and was sent to a court-ordered rehab program.

For Tilghman, incarceration is a good thing for him — it keeps him alive, off the streets, and gives him a chance in a treatment program.

San Francisco is still beautiful to her – with the Golden Gate Bridge, the Presidio and Fisherman’s Wharf, the Italian enclave of North Beach. But it’s gotten even scarier, and she thinks part of the blame lies with the politicians whose job it is to clean up the streets.

“I’m liberal,” Tilghman said. “My politics have stayed the same and things have gone crazy around me.”

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A San Francisco man who allegedly stole a car from Sunnyvale and drove it to San Carlos used a car sharing app called Getaround to target the car and find that the car had been arrested, the district attorney said San Mateo on Tuesday with.

Michael Guess, 26, used the app to search for cars in the area. App users are required to enter a passcode to access the key in the car if they agree to rent the car through the app, but Guess broke through the car window, took the key he knew was there and drove him to the San Carlos Fairfield Inn. Prosecutors said.

The victim pinged his car upon learning it was stolen and discovered it was in San Carlos. Prosecutors said he called the police, who went to the Fairfield Inn and found Guess asleep behind the wheel with a broken car window. He was arrested on suspicion of car theft and possession of an electric baton and multiple misdemeanors, prosecutors said. His next trial is October 4th.

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Oscar front-runner “La La Land” starts off with a bang, or should we say a burst – of jumps and pirouettes, not to mention bikes hurtling over the roofs of cars. It’s not easy to stage a successful dance scene for the cameras – especially at a motorway junction – but if such a scene works, it can be memorable.Yes it was heavenLOG SPINNING AND ARM WRESTLINGDANCING IN THE RAINMAMBO IN THE GYMTHE MAGIC OF MIKHAILSTEP IN TIMETRAVOLTA TRIFECTAYOU KNOW THAT LIFTA storm of dancing

A secret, says the choreographer of “La La Land”, Mandy Moore, is not to compete with the camera, but to find a way to dance with it, so to speak. “When done right, it’s that perfect marriage between the movement of the camera in conjunction and working with the movement of the dancer,” she says.

Dancing on a stage is three-dimensional; You lose a whole dimension on a screen. But what you can do is use the camera to convey emotions in a dancer in ways that you cannot on stage. “You can see how dance changes the person – that’s a key,” says Wendy Perron, former editor-in-chief of Dance Magazine and author of “Through the Eyes of a Dancer.”

Because everyone has their favorite dance moments in movies, and because the Oscars are coming, and because this stuff is just fun to remember (all available online), here are a few scenes where the cameras helped create dance magic:

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“I’m in heaven”, Fred Astaire sings to Ginger Rogers and drums Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek” in the film “Top Hat” from 1935. And so are we. “Fred is so cool and she’s so shy,” notes Moore, adding that the scene is so successful because it tells a story through movement. “They’re almost a little bit icy when they start out and then just as beautiful as they open up through the performance, and they’re just so free and beautiful when they dance together,” she says. Check out those passed out hurricanes towards the end.

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There is real gymnastics in Michael Kidd’s fast-paced choreography from the 1954 film “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers”. The big dance in the barn – with guys fighting for the girls – is a show stopper. Moore loves that this dance story is told without text. “These days we’re so used to being spoon-fed what we’re supposed to feel,” she says. Check out this guy on the spinning log, not to mention what can best be described as a balance beam routine that includes arm wrestling.

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Of course Kelly’s rain-soaked virtuoso performance in the title song of “Singin ‘in the Rain” (1952) is a miracle – especially when you consider that, according to the film story, he had a bad cold and a fever. Then there’s Donald O’Connor’s athletics – including somersaults to climb the wall – in Make ‘Em Laugh. But let’s look at the late Debbie Reynolds, who had no dance training at age 19 and somehow held her own, knocking with Kelly and O’Connor on the joyous “good morning” – which she believed made her feet bleed.

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There is no debate about the brilliance of Jerome Robbins’ choreography for “West Side Story” (1961). But which dance scene is rated the best? For Moore, it’s this opening with the jets and sharks and those snapping fingers. “You just take this snap and a little jump and everyone knows right away that it’s ‘West Side Story’,” she says. For Perron, it’s the mambo dance in the gym that Maria (Natalie Wood) and Tony (Richard Beymer) fall in love with. Especially that cinematic moment “when everyone else blurs and Tony and Maria come into focus and it’s just an amazing falling in love moment. The music slows down and it’s inevitable that they’ll come together and ignore the whole world.” . “

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You can deny the overall quality of the 1985 White Nights, but there is one thing you cannot deny: the dancing skills of Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines. The two who both play defectors (it’s complicated) have silly dialogues but compelling dancing, together and separately. And if you only have two minutes, look for “Baryshnikov” and “11 pirouettes”. For 11 rubles he does a really single pirouette with 11 turns – perfect. In street clothes.

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They’re making a high profile sequel to “Mary Poppins,” but for many it will be difficult to reconcile some of the memories of the 1964 original, like Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke who featured in “Step in Time” – this joyous one Chimney – dancing sweep scene on the rooftops of London. “It takes the dirty, sooty experience of working on chimneys, and it makes it magical,” says Perron.

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You have to give it to John Travolta, who has provided more than his share of lasting dance memories. First there was “Saturday Night Fever” (1977), where the actor became famous on screen as Tony Manero, King of Disco and Champion of the Strut. Just a year later, he tore up the gym floor in “Grease” with Olivia Newton-John. And in 1994 there was this understated – but unforgettable – twist competition with Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction.

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Nobody lets baby off a list. Before Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling made “La La Land”, they made “Crazy, Stupid, Love” (2011), in which they recreated the famous “Dirty Dancing” lift made famous in 1987 by Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Gray A. Enough said.

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If you watch a dance clip let it be this: the Nicholas Brothers, Fayard and Harold, in their performance in “Stormy Weather” (1943), which must be seen to be believed. It’s not just that the brothers, who have overcome racial hurdles to make a name for themselves for their amazing talent, tap and twirl and jump tables; They also jump in movements that appear to be terribly painful. In the end they jump over each other via a staircase and land in crevices every time. And then they get up and smile. “You can’t be stopped,” says Perron. “And they make it so fun.”

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Alex Wong / Getty Images

A Russian hacker stole the identities of 22 of the 75 living recipients of the U.S. Congress ‘s Medal of Honor and used their stolen personal information to buy tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of Apple products and luxury watches on American military exchanges obtained from The Daily Beast.

The hot merchandise was then shipped to at least 20 different addresses in the US using ignorant scammers hired through seemingly innocuous online advertisements. The parcels were then forwarded to a Moscow suburb, where a training academy for a Russian spy agency is located. In total, the fraudster netted nearly $ 55,000 worth of stolen goods in around 50 separate transactions, according to investigators. The individual award winners whose personal data was used will not be named in the registration that was unsealed in December 2020.

The Congressional Medal of Honor is the country’s highest military award for valiant deeds and was first awarded in 1863. The existence of the identity theft investigation was previously unknown.

Poisoners, hackers, meddlers, spies: How Russian agents ran wild in 2020

According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), U.S. military veterans are 76 percent more likely to be victims of identity theft than civilians. Last year, the FTC received 56,451 identity theft reports from members of the military with an average fraud loss of $ 600, roughly double the $ 311 civilians lost to fraudsters. The investigation into Congressional Medal of Honor identity theft began just months before the April 2014 hack by the U.S. Office of Human Resources Management (OPM) revealed the personal information, including Social Security numbers, of millions of troops and veterinarians nearly 15 years old were years. The authorities were unaware of the breach (OPM) until March 2015, giving the hackers about a year to operate undetected.

The Secret Service, which investigates financial crime in addition to its more well-known protective obligations, first learned of the Congressional Medal of Honor fraud in February 2014. The stolen personal information was used to establish fraudulent lines of credit through the Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES), a network of military-based retail stores operated by the Department of Defense. These accounts were then used to purchase expensive AAFES merchandise on behalf of the award winners, which were shipped to approximately 20 different addresses across the United States. From there the packages were forwarded to Balashikha, a town about 15 miles east of Moscow. The training academy of the Russian Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB, is located there.

The story goes on

Most of these middlemen were recruited through websites aimed at Russian-speaking nationals.

“Have a nice day! My name is Maksim Znaeshev and I need energetic workers as packers,” said a job advertisement that appeared in January 2014. “This job is easy and at home. Your salary depends on the work done, usually it is it $ 20-50 per day depends on the number of orders in your state and the speed of your work. Only people are responsible with 2-3 hours a day for free and no bad habits! Email me: Maksim .Zna @ gmail.com… ”

Another requested résumé from applicants, pointing out that “the job is not difficult, nothing bulky and difficult to pack is not necessary. All states except Alaska. “

Kiril Motorin, a Maryland chimney sweep, was one of those who responded. He told The Daily Beast that he never spoke to anyone on the phone and never knew the name of the person he worked for.

Motorin, a Russian-speaking Israeli citizen, told intelligence agents who eventually turned up at his home that it was his job to “receive packages, most of which had different recipient names and were from different companies, and then forward the packages to other addresses.” both in the USA and in Russia. He said he received $ 20 a package and that all correspondence with his “employer” was via email.

The two created a paper path for the fraudulently received products, which Motorin shared with the investigators. This included copies of receipts from the U.S. Postal Service, which Motorin used to prove to his boss that he had actually shipped the goods as promised. Motorin also provided the Secret Service with email correspondence sent from his overseas contact stating that Motorin would be paid for his work through a PayPal account. In a message, the contact and Motorin discussed a shipment of Apple devices purchased through AAFES with the stolen identity of the recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor. The equipment was sent to Motorin’s Maryland home and had to be shipped back to Balashikha, the alleged fraudster said.

Sometimes Motorin was instructed to send the packages he received to UNEOL Post, a now defunct mail order company in Salem, New Hampshire. UNEOL owners Anastasia and Sergey Bulavchenko pleaded guilty of tax evasion in an unrelated credit card fraud case in 2017 and have reportedly returned to Russia, where they would await two years parole under the contract. The Daily Beast was unable to reach the couple for comment.

The investigators were able to connect the e-mail address used by the alleged fraudster to the registrar of three Russian carding forums where identity thieves buy and sell stolen personal data. According to online records, the email is linked to Evgenij Veremejchik from Sim, Russia.

Veremejchik is not listed as a defendant on federal court files, and the disposition of the Congressional Medal of Honor case is unknown.

For his part, Motorin says he has no idea what happened after being questioned by the secret service.

“He spoke to me once,” he said, referring to the interviewer, “and that’s it.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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