LONDON (BBC): Cuban ballet dancer Alicia Alonso has died age 98, the country’s state media has announced.
Alonso is considered one of the greatest 20th Century ballerinas. She began to lose her sight at 19, relying on only the stage lights to guide her.
After the 1959 revolution, she helped found the National Ballet of Cuba with then leader Fidel Castro. “Alicia Alonso has gone and left an enormous void but unbeatable legacy,” President Miguel Diaz-Canel said.
“She positioned Cuba at the altar of the best of dance worldwide. Thank you Alicia for your immortal work,” he added.
Born Alicia Ernestina de la Caridad Martínez del Hoyo on 21 December 1921, she first appeared on stage in 1931. She fell in love with ballet.
“When you look out and you see the theatre full of people you feel that you are alive, that you have been born. It’s wonderful, it’s unique,” she told the BBC in 2015.
At the age of 16, she married fellow student Fernando Alonso and the pair moved to New York, joining Ballet Caravan. Three years later, her eyesight began to deteriorate. She was diagnosed with a detached retina.
She told the BBC: “I suffered terribly with my sight and had to have various operations on my eyes. Detachment of the retina. It was terrible. They told me not to quickly lower my head or move it side to side. I was like that for two years.

Paul Rudd will not divulge secrets

Los Angeles (CNN): Paul Rudd may be the most trustworthy man in Hollywood. The actor, who appeared on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” Thursday, would not reveal the secret to his seemingly endless youth and refused to dish about his upcoming “Ghostbusters” movie.
“I just finished about two weeks ago,” Rudd told Kimmel, adding that the director is Jason Reitman, who is the son of Ivan Reitman, the director of the original “Ghostbusters.”
“There’s something special about that,” Rudd said.
But Rudd did talk about his new Netflix show, “Living With Yourself,” in which he plays a man who gets cloned in a spa mishap.
The show opens with Rudd’s character buried alive and clawing his way out of the ground. He described the process of filming the scene to Kimmel, saying it involved a snorkel like breathing tube, cold dirt, and bicycle riders passing by to gawk at him dressed in nothing but an adult diaper.