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June 2013 (1)
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Obituaries

This page lists the obituaries of people who made news during their lifetimes. Obituaries of historians can be found here.
  • Donald Hornig, Last to See First A-Bomb, Dies at 92
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  • Nguyen Khanh, General Who Led Coup, Dies at 86
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  • Cardinal Jozef Glemp, longtime leader of Poland’s Roman Catholic church, dies at 83
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  • James A. Hood, Student Who Challenged Segregation, Dies at 70
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  • Gen. Yang Baibing Dies at 93; Led Tiananmen Crackdown
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  • Prospero Gallinari, a Terrorist, Is Dead at 62
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  • Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Psychologist Who Studied Depression in Women, Dies at 53
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    Donald Hornig, Last to See First A-Bomb, Dies at 92

    SOURCE: NYT(1-27-13)

    In a small shed at the top of a 100-foot-tall steel tower deep in the New Mexico desert, Donald Hornig sat next to the world’s first atomic bomb in the late evening of July 15, 1945, reading a book of humorous essays. A storm raged, and he shuddered at each lightning flash.

    It was his second trip to the tower that day as part of the Manhattan Project, the secret American effort to build an atomic bomb. He had earlier armed the device, code-named Trinity, connecting switches he had designed to the detonators.

    But J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the project, had grown nervous about leaving the bomb alone. He told Dr. Hornig to return to the tower and baby-sit the bomb....
    2013-01-28 13:03
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    Nguyen Khanh, General Who Led Coup, Dies at 86

    SOURCE: NYT(1-28-13)

    Nguyen Khanh, a South Vietnamese general who briefly seized control of the government before being deposed and sent into exile, died on Jan. 11 in San Jose, Calif. He was 86.

    The cause was health problems related to diabetes, according to a statement from Chanh Nguyen Huu, who succeeded General Khanh as head of a self-described South Vietnamese government in exile in California.

    General Khanh’s rise to power in the 1960s, and his ultimate defeat, came during a period of deep political turmoil in South Vietnam, marked by several coup attempts in which he played a role....
    2013-01-28 12:55
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    Cardinal Jozef Glemp, longtime leader of Poland’s Roman Catholic church, dies at 83

    SOURCE: WaP(1-24-13)

    WARSAW, Poland — Cardinal Jozef Glemp, the longtime head of Poland’s influential Roman Catholic church at a time when it played a key role in the fight against communism, has died. He was 83.

    Jozef Kloch, a church spokesman, said in a statement that Glemp died Wednesday evening in Warsaw. Glemp had been ill for many years, and the Polish news agency PAP said he had lung cancer. Earlier in the day Warsaw Archbishop Kazimierz Nycz had asked the faithful to pray for Glemp, noting that his condition was deteriorating.

    Glemp oversaw the church at a critical time in its history and in that of Poland, a largely Catholic nation....
    2013-01-24 18:25
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    James A. Hood, Student Who Challenged Segregation, Dies at 70

    SOURCE: NYT(1-21-13)

    James A. Hood, who integrated the University of Alabama in 1963 together with his fellow student Vivian Malone after Gov. George C. Wallace capitulated to the federal government in a signature moment of the civil rights movement known as the “stand in the schoolhouse door,” died on Thursday in Gadsden, Ala. He was 70.

    His death was confirmed by his daughter Mary Hood.

    On the morning of June 11, 1963, Mr. Hood and Ms. Malone, backed by a federal court order, sought to become the first blacks to successfully pursue a degree at Alabama. A black woman, Autherine Lucy, had been admitted in 1956 but was suspended three days later, ostensibly for her safety, when the university was hit by riots. She was later expelled....
    2013-01-22 15:42
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    Gen. Yang Baibing Dies at 93; Led Tiananmen Crackdown

    SOURCE: NYT(1-17-13)

    BEIJING — Gen. Yang Baibing, a military strongman who carried out the violent suppression of student-led protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and was later purged because of fears that he was accruing too much power, died here on Tuesday. He was 93.

    His death was reported by the official Xinhua news agency. A statement issued by the party’s Central Committee provided the sort of terse homage typically reserved for a disgraced political figure, saying, “He was a seasoned loyal Communist fighter and a proletarian revolutionist.”

    The younger half brother of Yang Shangkun, a former president of China and a Red Army luminary, General Yang had largely been forgotten in the two decades since the paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, stripped the brothers of their posts out of concern that they were seeking to upend his succession plan with what some analysts described as a “minicoup.” Their downfall was probably abetted by Deng’s handpicked successor, Jiang Zemin, as he moved to isolate potential rivals in his drive to consolidate power....
    2013-01-18 12:57
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    Prospero Gallinari, a Terrorist, Is Dead at 62

    SOURCE: NYT(1-18-13)

    Prospero Gallinari, who as a member of the Italian terrorist group the Red Brigades was convicted in the kidnapping and assassination in 1978 of Aldo Moro, the Italian prime minister, died Monday after collapsing at his home in Reggio Emilia, in northern Italy. He was 62. He was long believed to have been the gunman in the killing until a comrade took responsibility.

    Mr. Gallinari had a history of heart trouble, Italian newspapers said, citing police reports confirming his death.

    The Red Brigades, a vicious and idiosyncratic Marxist-Leninist paramilitary organization, engaged in robberies, assaults and assassinations in the 1970s as part of a campaign to foment leftist revolution in Italy. The group’s most notorious act was kidnapping Mr. Moro in March 1978. It held him for 55 days and then shot him to death. Mr. Moro’s body was found in a car trunk on May 9, 1978, the same day he was murdered....
    2013-01-18 12:55
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    Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Psychologist Who Studied Depression in Women, Dies at 53

    SOURCE: NYT(1-14-13)

    Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, a psychologist and writer whose work helped explain why women are twice as prone to depression as men and why such low moods can be so hard to shake, died on Jan. 2 in New Haven. She was 53.

    Her death followed heart surgery to correct a congenitally weak valve, said her husband, Richard Nolen-Hoeksema.

    Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema, a professor at Yale University, began studying depression in the 1980s, a time of great excitement in psychiatry and psychology. New drugs like Prozac were entering the market; novel talking therapies were proving effective, too, particularly cognitive behavior therapy, in which people learn to defuse upsetting thoughts by questioning their basis.

    Her studies, first in children and later in adults, exposed one of the most deceptively upsetting of these patterns: rumination, the natural instinct to dwell on the sources of problems rather than their possible solutions. Women were more prone to ruminate than men, the studies found, and in a landmark 1987 paper she argued that this difference accounted for the two-to-one ratio of depressed women to depressed men....
    2013-01-15 13:43
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