Obituaries
This page lists the obituaries of people who made news during their lifetimes. Obituaries of historians can be found here.
SOURCE: NYT(5-28-11)
Gil Scott-Heron, the poet and recording artist whose syncopated spoken style and mordant critiques of politics, racism and mass media in pieces like “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” made him a notable voice of black protest culture in the 1970s and an important early influence on hip-hop, died on Friday at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 62 and had been a longtime resident of Harlem.
His death was announced in a Twitter message on Friday night by his British publisher, Jamie Byng, and confirmed early Saturday by an American representative of his record label, XL. The cause was not immediately known, although The Associated Press reported that he had become ill after returning from a trip to Europe.
Mr. Scott-Heron often bristled at the suggestion that his work had prefigured rap. “I don’t know if I can take the blame for it,” he said in an interview last year with the music Web site The Daily Swarm. He preferred to call himself a “bluesologist,” drawing on the traditions of blues, jazz and Harlem renaissance poetics....
SOURCE: NYT(5-19-11)
LONDON — Garret FitzGerald, who served twice as Irish prime minister, helped set the stage for peace in Northern Ireland and shifted the tone of Ireland’s relations with Britain, died Thursday in Dublin. He was 85.
The Irish government said he died after a short illness.
Across the country, flags were lowered to half-staff on government buildings, and a former president, Mary Robinson, struck the national mood when she said, “There’ll be a sadness way beyond the political.”
Mr. FitzGerald, who was prime minister in the 1980s, died just as British-Irish relations broke new ground with a visit by Queen Elizabeth II, the first British monarch to visit the Irish Republic. The queen said Mr. FitzGerald had made a “lasting contribution to peace.”...
SOURCE: AP(5-1-11)
Landau was an Israeli Supreme Court justice when he was picked to head the three-judge panel for the Eichmann trial. Eichmann, who was in charge of the "final solution," the Nazi plan to kill all the Jews of Europe, was kidnapped from Argentina in 1960 by Israel's Mossad spy agency. He was convicted and hanged.
The trial, broadcast on Israeli radio and followed closely by the people, brought about a major change in attitudes toward Holocaust survivors. Up until then, Israelis, who saw themselves as self-sufficient heroes, denigrated the survivors as helpless victims. The trial brought out the horrors and deprivations the Jews faced, as well as their mostly feeble efforts to rebel, leading to a new appreciation of their plight among Israelis....
