Dead Celebrity Alert

DETROIT — Neal Shine, who began as a copy boy for Detroit Free Press and worked his way up to become its managing editor and later its publisher, died Tuesday of respiratory failure after a recent illness. He was 76.

Shine was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer in 1993 and overcame it, but recent tests found it had returned. He also had a case of pneumonia, the newspaper reported in a story on its Web site. He died surrounded by his family at a hospital. …

First hired at the Free Press in 1950, Shine was city editor when the paper won the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1967 Detroit riot. As a reporter, he exposed the mishandling of cases in the Macomb County juvenile courts. …

Shine also was an impassioned civic activist and Detroit booster… Read full obituary

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Jacob O. Booher, who worked for The Associated Press for 35 years and retired as a bureau chief in Ohio, has died at age 69.

He died Tuesday at home in Maryville, Tenn. He had been hospitalized previously with congestive heart failure. …

“Jake was an ace high newsman and a real credit to the AP,” said Ed Heminger, chairman of the board of the Findlay Publishing Co. and a former AP board member. … Read full obituary

AUSTIN — Molly Ivins, whose biting columns mixed liberal populism with an irreverent Texas wit, died at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday at her home in Austin after an up-and-down battle with breast cancer she had waged for seven years. She was 62. …

A California native who moved to Houston as a young child with her family, Ms. Ivins was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999. Two years later after enduring a radical mastectomy and rounds of chemotherapy, Ms. Ivins was given a 70 percent chance of remaining cancer-free for five years. At the time, she said she liked the odds.

But the cancer recurred in 2003, and again last year. In recent weeks, she had suspended her twice-weekly syndicated column, allowing guest writers to use the space while she underwent further treatment. She made a brief return to writing in mid-January, urging readers to resist President Bush’s plan to increase the number of U.S. troops deployed to Iraq. She likened her call to an old-fashioned “newspaper crusade.”

“We are the people who run this country,” Ms Ivins said in the column published in the Jan. 14 edition of the Star-Telegram. “We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war.

“Raise hell,” she continued. “Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we’re for them and are trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush’s proposed surge.”

She ended the piece by endorsing the peace march in Washington scheduled for Saturday. 01-27 “We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, “Stop it, now!’ ” she wrote. … Read full obituary

Art Buchwald, who took humorous jabs at Washington politicians in syndicated columns for decades, has died, a close friend said Thursday. He was 81.

Buchwald died late Wednesday, said CNN anchor Kyra Phillips. Buchwald was her mentor for 18 years, and she became a close friend of the family. The unofficial cause of death, she said, was kidney failure. …

He planned his funeral when he went to the hospice.

“I went to the hospice to die,” he told Phillips in November. But he defied the odds, and in July he was flown to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, to spend the summer. …

Buchwald launched his career as a columnist in 1949 in Paris, where he wrote about the light side of Paris nightlife in the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune. He returned to the United States around 1962 and moved to Washington, where he began writing columns filled with political satire for The Washington Post. …

Buchwald won a Pulitzer Prize for outstanding commentary in 1982, and in 1986 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He began writing columns, later syndicated, for The Washington Post in the late 1960s.

The humorist authored dozens of books, including two memoirs, “Leaving Home” (1993) and “I’ll Always Have Paris” (1996). He also wrote “Paris After Dark” (1950), “Son of the Great Society” (1961), “Washington Is Leaking” (1976) and “While Reagan Slept” (1983). … Read full obituary

PC World lost a treasured colleague and friend Tuesday, when Senior Technical Editor Rex Farrance was killed during a home-invasion robbery attempt. For 19 years, Rex served PC World with professionalism and a passion for accuracy. …

As news of the attack spread on Wednesday, current and former coworkers, as well as colleagues in the technology industry, shared their shock and grief. …

Rex was an expert on data storage technologies, but covered many products and services throughout his tenure at PC World.

He was also a dapper dresser who earned the nickname “Mr. Savile Row” around the office for the suits and sport jackets he wore, no matter how casual workplace attire became over the years. He always attached an American flag pin to his lapel. “He was a real gentleman,” added McLeod. … Read full obituary

The death of Mohan Seneviratne has friends and family mystified at how a traditional New Year’s Day dip into the waters of Coney Island could have ended in absolute tragedy for a promising young man.

The 32-year-old journalist from Manhattan died on Friday after suffering spinal chord and neck injuries while taking a dive into the ocean, a 104-year-old tradition that draws hundreds of novice cold water swimmers each year. …

[Dr. Upali Seneviratne said] that no eyewitness accounts have completely explained what led up to his son’s fateful dive.

Though his son had suffered a severe spinal cord injury, he was in stable condition during the first night after the accident, his father said. But his condition deteriorated over a few days. … Read full obituary

Veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley died Thursday at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan of complications from leukemia.

Bradley joined the staff of the venerable news magazine 26 years ago. His consummate skills as a broadcast journalist and his distinctive body of work were recognized with numerous awards, including 19 Emmys, the latest for a segment that reported the reopening of the 50-year-old racial murder case of Emmett Till.

Bradley grew up in a tough section of Philadelphia, was wounded while covering the Vietnam War and later became the first black White House correspondent for CBS News. …

“He certainly was a reporter’s reporter,” fellow 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace told CBS News Radio. …

Bradley’s groundbreaking journalism included an interview with condemned Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh — the only television interview ever given by the man guilty of one of the worst terrorist acts on American soil. It also earned Bradley an Emmy.

His reporting on the worst school shooting in American history, “Columbine,” revealed that authorities ignored telling evidence with which they might have prevented the massacre. …

Extensive coverage, tributes, photos & video, from CBS

Obit to come.

CBS News is reporting the death of veteran correspondent Christopher Glenn, who retired earlier this year. He was 68 years old.

Glenn will be inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in Chicago on November 4th.

Glenn was an integral part of CBS Radio News since 1971, where he first started as a special events producer. He became a correspondent in 1976.

In addition to his weekday hourly news anchor responsibilities, Glenn was anchor of the “CBS World News Roundup,” the longest-running news program in broadcasting. He came to the “Roundup” in April, 1999, after spending 11 years in a similar capacity for “The World Tonight.”

Glenn may have been best known for his coverage of the space program, including memorably anchoring coverage of the Shuttle Challenger disaster on January 26, 1986.

He also covered numerous assignments for CBS News Television. Glenn was the reporter/narrator for the Emmy award-winning “IN THE NEWS” series of current event broadcasts for young viewers throughout its 15 year history (1971-1986). … Read full obituary

R. W. Apple Jr., who in more than 40 years as a correspondent and editor at The New York Times wrote about war and revolution, politics and government, food and drink, and the revenge of living well from more than 100 countries, died early this morning in Washington. He was 71. …

With his Dickensian byline, Churchillian brio and Falstaffian appetites, Mr. Apple, who was known as Johnny, was a singular presence at The Times almost from the moment he joined the metropolitan staff in 1963. … Read full obituary

Oriana Fallaci, a dissecting interviewer of the powerful and an iconoclastic journalist turned icon herself, who in recent years wrote angrily about the threat of Islam, died today in her home city of Florence, the hospital reported. She was 77.

She had suffered from cancer for the last decade. Italian press reports said that Ms. Fallaci, who lived in New York and Florence, had checked into the Santa Chiara private clinic in Florence last week.

She became famous in the 1960’s and ’70’s for her war reporting and long, aggressive and revealing interviews with prominent people. Ms. Fallaci was once labeled “the journalist to whom virtually no world figure would say no.” Among others, she interviewed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni, Yasir Arafat, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Nguyen Van Thieu and Henry Kissinger.

Mr. Kissinger, President Nixon’s secretary of state, called the experience “the most disastrous conversation I ever had with any member of the press.” She had coaxed him to admit, at the height of his power and celebrity in 1972, that at times he felt like “the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town.” … Read full obituary

Peter Greenough, a journalist and the husband of opera soprano Beverly Sills for nearly a half-century, has died, Sills’ manager said Thursday. He was 89.

Greenough died Wednesday at a Manhattan hospital after a long illness, manager Edgar Vincent said.

Greenough began his journalism career in 1946 as a reporter for The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer. He left The Plain Dealer in 1960 to become general business editor at the Boston Herald. He later wrote a financial column for The Boston Globe.

But as Sills’ career flourished, he left journalism in 1969 to manage the family’s affairs. … Read full obituary

George Crile III, an award-winning CBS News journalist and best-selling author, died Monday. Crile, who lived in New York City, suffered from pancreatic cancer diagnosed in November 2005. He was 61.

Crile worked more than 25 years as a producer and correspondent for CBS News and would occasionally appear in pieces he reported and produced. At first, he worked for the documentary unit “CBS Reports” but in 1985, began producing for 60 Minutes. “Charlie Wilson’s War”, Crile’s 2003 book that spent months on the New York Times’ best seller list, began with a 60 Minutes profile in 1988 of a Texas congressman named Charlie Wilson. … Read full obituary

Veteran Nine Network reporter Richard Carleton has died after suffering a suspected heart attack at Tasmania’s Beaconsfield gold mine this afternoon.

Carleton collapsed shortly after asking a question at a news conference about 1pm. Members of the media began performing chest compressions as an ambulance crew arrived.

Carleton, who reports for the network’s flagship 60 Minutes program, has a history of heart problems. …

Prior to Carleton’s collapse, children had gathered to collect autographs from some of the high-profile television personalities covering the mine drama.

One little girl’s mother said that Carleton wrote on her daughter’s piece of paper: “Have a healthy life”. … Read full obituary

Bill Beutel, the longtime television news anchor and host of the show that became ABC’s “Good Morning America,” has died, the network announced. He was 75.

Beutel, whose trademark signoff “Good luck and be well” closed WABC’s nightly local newscast for more than 30 years, died Saturday at his home in Pinehurst, N.C., the network said. The cause of death was not disclosed.

In 1975, Beutel hosted “AM America,” the network’s national morning news show. … Read full obituary