Obituaries
This page lists the obituaries of people who made news during their lifetimes. Obituaries of historians can be found here.
SOURCE: BBC(4-27-11)
Prominent Cuban anti-Castro militant Orlando Bosch, 84, has died in the US city of Miami.
Mr Bosch was arrested in Venezuela for the bombing in 1976 of a Cuban airliner, in which 73 people died.
He was later acquitted of the charges, first by a military court, and later by a civilian court.
Speaking in 2005, Mr Bosch said the truth about the bombing would be revealed in a tape and documents to be made public after his death.
The cause of his death has not yet been released....
SOURCE: NYT(4-26-11)
Madame Nhu, who as the glamorous official hostess in South Vietnam’s presidential palace became a politically powerful and often harshly outspoken figure in the early years of the Vietnam War, died on Sunday in Rome, where she had been living. She was believed to be 87.
Her death was confirmed by her sister, Lechi Oggeri.
Born in 1924 — the date is uncertain, though some sources say April 15 — she spent the last four decades in Rome and southern France.
Her parents named her Tran Le Xuan, or “Beautiful Spring.” As the official hostess to the unmarried president of South Vietnam, her brother-in-law, she was formally known as Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu. But to the American journalists, diplomats and soldiers caught up in the intrigues of Saigon in the early 1960s, she was “the Dragon Lady,” a symbol of everything that was wrong with the American effort to save her country from Communism....
SOURCE: BBC(4-21-11)
A former Gurkha soldier who won the Victoria Cross and later became the figurehead for a campaign on Gurkha's rights to settle in the UK has died.
Tul Bahadur Pun died in his home village of Myagdi, in Nepal, aged 88.
He received the Victoria Cross for saving the lives of dozens of his comrades in Burma during WWII.
In 2009 he campaigned for Gurkhas' rights alongside actress Joanna Lumley, who credited him as having saved her own soldier father's life in 1944.
Although Mr Pun was listed as 88 years old when he died it is thought his real age was 92, because birth records were inaccurate in the country at the time.
He won the military decoration after he saved the lives of his comrades by single-handedly attacking a Japanese machine-gun position in Burma in June 1944. ...
SOURCE: BBC(4-18-11)
Brigadier Sawai Bhawani Singh, the last Maharajah of Jaipur, in the western Indian state of Rajasthan, has died.
Brigadier Singh, who continued to be revered as a social and cultural icon after India abolished royal titles, died after a long illness. He was 79.
He took over as the Maharajah after the death of his father in 1970, but royal titles were abolished shortly after.
Former royals are still associated with the wealth and glamour of the past and attract a lot of interest in India.
Jaipur was one of scores of kingdoms which existed in India until the country's independence from Britain in 1947.
The Rajasthan government has announced two days of mourning....
SOURCE: NYT(4-10-11)
His stepdaughter, Leslie Gimbel, said the cause was lymphoma.
“While the goal of all movies is to entertain,” Mr. Lumet once wrote, “the kind of film in which I believe goes one step further. It compels the spectator to examine one facet or another of his own conscience. It stimulates thought and sets the mental juices flowing.”
Social issues set his own mental juices flowing, and his best films not only probed the consequences of prejudice, corruption and betrayal, but also celebrated individual acts of courage....
