Dead Celebrity Alert

Lloyd Cutler, the lawyer whose abilities, discretion and charm made him the quintessential Washington insider for more than half a century, died at the weekend at the age of 87 from complications from a broken hip.

A lifelong Democrat, he was drafted into troubleshooting services by presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, when they ran into difficulties over the Iranian hostage crisis and Whitewater respectively. But he crossed party lines when asked, Ronald Reagan and the current president both appointing him to high-level commissions. …

Lloyd Norton Cutler was born in New York on November 10 1917. His father, also a lawyer, was a partner of Fiorello La Guardia, the city’s vivid congressman and mayor, and the young Cutler was told tales of Tammany Hall shenanigans round the family dinner table. … Read full obituary

VANCOUVER, British Columbia - Afghan singer Nasrat Parsa died after an attack outside his hotel following a weekend performance at a downtown Vancouver theater, police said Monday. He was 36.

Parsa, who had performed in Toronto earlier in the week, was outside his hotel with his brother, Najib, when he was assaulted by three men early Sunday, police constable Tim Fanning said.

Parsa, who had been living in Germany, died later after sustaining a brain injury, according to his official Web site. …

Parsa, who was born in Kabul, had released 10 albums since he started recording in 1989, including his new collection “Dil.” He toured all over the world and had been in Canada for the past month, promoting the collection of soft melodies. … Read full obituary

Washington, D.C., May 5, 2005 — Col. David H. Hackworth, the United States Army’s legendary, highly decorated guerrilla fighter and lifelong champion of the doughboy and dogface, ground-pounder and grunt, died Wednesday in Mexico. He was 74 years old. The cause of death was a form of cancer now appearing with increasing frequency among Vietnam veterans exposed to the defoliants called Agents Orange and Blue.

Col. Hackworth spent more than half a century on the country’s hottest battlefields, first as a soldier, then as a writer, war correspondent and sharp-eyed critic of the Military-Industrial Complex and ticket-punching generals he dismissed as “Perfumed Princes.” … Read full obituary

(Cocoa, Florida) Jack Nichols, one of the pioneers of gay liberation and a prolific writer, died early Monday in hospital after a long illness. He was 67.

In 1961, Nichols along with Frank Kameny, founded the Mattachine Society of Washington — one of the earliest groups to fight for gay rights in America. …

Nichols particularly was responsible for challenging the then prevalent psychiatric model of homosexuality as mental illness.

In 1965 he was instrumental in organizing some of the first public gay demonstrations in the United States — including the first protest at White House. … Read full obituary

He was a self-confessed beatnik, a bum, a hippy, a semi-trained journalist, a philosopher and an ecologist, but the last thing Bob Hunter said he ever imagined doing was co-founding a group that ended up as a multinational company with 2.5 million members, branches in 40 countries and a byword for environmental activism.

Mr Hunter, who died yesterday of prostate cancer aged 62, was a founding father of Greenpeace, and the most influential of all its early leaders. A radical young columnist on the Vancouver Sun newspaper, he had volunteered in 1969 to sail to the Aleutian Islands off Alaska in a barely seaworthy charter boat to try to stop the US testing an atomic bomb.

As the only person among the draft dodgers, peaceniks and political idealists who understood how the media worked, he filed lurid — and hilarious — columns to document the voyage. … Read full obituary