Dead Celebrity Alert

October 4, 1917 - July 11, 2008

Roy M. Huffington was a struggling Texan wildcatter who struck it rich in the oil and gas reserves of Indonesia. He went on to become US Ambassador to Austria under President George H. W. Bush.

Bush, himself a former Texan oilman, was a long-time friend of Huffington who had been a significant sponsor of his political campaigns, and he succeeded where President Ronald Reagan had failed in persuading Huffington to become Ambassador to Austria in 1990 after he had sold his company for an estimated $600 million, according to Huffington. … Read full obituary

May 18, 1940 - May 10, 2008

Alan Brooks was a lifelong campaigner against injustice who played a pivotal role in Britain’s Anti-Apartheid Movement in the 1970s and 1980s.

Alan Keith Brooks was born in Bristol in 1940 and emigrated to Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, with his family at the age of 7. Having secured a Beit Trust scholarship at the University of Cape Town, he studied law and later lectured in the African Studies department.

He joined the South African Liberal Party and was recruited into the secretive, mostly white, African Resistance Movement. Brooks became a member of the South African Communist Party (SACP) in 1962. In 1964, after a brief campaign of sabotage, ARM activists were arrested. Brooks was imprisoned for two years.

After his release he was deported to Britain. At Sussex University — which was also attended by his SACP colleague, later President, Thabo Mbeki — Brooks studied international politics. By 1969 he was the secretary of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, in which role he organised protests against South Africa’s Springbok rugby team during the successful Stop the 70 Tour campaign. … Read full obituary

December 31, 1916 - May 25, 2008

Ítalo Luder was a Peronist politician who became interim president of Argentina for 34 days during the turbulent 1970s. During his month in power he signed controversial decrees that authorised the repression of left-wing guerrilla groups. In 1983 he became the first Peronist presidential candidate to lose a democratic election. …

In 1949 Luder was appointed to the constituent assembly for the Peronist party and played a leading role in drawing up a new constitution under the recently-elected president, Juan Domingo Perón.

When Perón was overthrown by a military coup in 1955 and forced into exile, he was tried by the new regime for “betraying the Fatherland”. The party chose Luder to defend their leader in court. However, Peronism was subsequently banned in Argentina for almost two decades. … Read full obituary

Tony Snow, a former White House spokesman and veteran radio and television journalist, has died following a long battle with colon cancer, his former employers said Saturday. He was 53.

Snow was a commentator on the Fox News network when he was named President George W. Bush’s chief spokesman in May 2006. He stepped down in September after 16 months on the job. …

Snow worked as a speechwriter under Bush’s father, president George H.W. Bush, in the early 1990s. …

Snow joined Fox in 1996 as the first anchor of “Fox News Sunday,” a weekend morning talk show, and hosted “Weekend Live” and a radio program, “The Tony Snow Show,” before leaving for the White House. … Read full obituary

December 9, 1914 - May 9, 2008

A leader of the Jewish militia force that bombed Jerusalem’s King David Hotel in 1946, Samuel Katz went on to become one of the most prominent figures to claim that since the late 1970s the Israeli Right had become too soft.

A one-time Fleet Street journalist, Katz moved to British Mandate Palestine after the war and spent his life fighting for his right-wing Zionist principles, first through the Irgun underground militia, then as a parliamentarian, and subsequently as a writer and ideologue. … Read full obituary

Glencairn Balfour-Paul, CMG, soldier, colonial administrator, diplomat, traveller, writer and poet, was born on September 23, 1917. He died on July 2, 2008, aged 90

When Glen Balfour-Paul was appointed British Ambassador to Baghdad in 1969 a friend remarked: “How clever of the Foreign Office to send someone to Iraq who doesn’t look like an ambassador.” Saddam Hussein was then plotting his way to the presidency but meanwhile had to be content with running the Baath party’s security apparatus. Later Balfour-Paul had to confront the tyrant, but he had come up through the Army and the Sudan Political Service (SPS), so was accustomed to taking the rough with the smooth. …Read full obituary

Jesse Helms, the former North Carolina senator whose courtly manner and mossy drawl barely masked a hard-edged conservatism that opposed civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art, died early Friday. He was 86.

Helms’s former chief of staff, James Broughton, said the senator died at the Mayview Convalescent Center in Raleigh, where he had lived for several years. Helms had been in “a period of declining health,” Broughton said.

In a 52-year political career that ended with his retirement from the Senate in 2002, Helms became a beacon for the right wing of American politics, a lightning rod for the left and, often, a mighty pain for presidents whatever their political leaning. … Read full obituary

Robert “Robby” Stamps, one of 13 students shot by Ohio National Guardsmen during a Vietnam War protest May 4, 1970, at Kent State University, has died of complications from pneumonia.

Mr. Stamps, 58, died Wednesday in Tallahassee, Fla. A private funeral is scheduled for Monday at a friend’s house. A memorial service is planned in San Diego. …

The residue of May 4 remained with him. And he often reflected on it.

“The guardsmen who killed four students and wounded nine others have neither told the truth nor been held accountable for their actions,” he wrote in a guest editorial for the Akron Beacon Journal in March 1996. …

He was in the wrong place at the wrong time when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on the crowd at an anti-war rally at Kent State.

“Instinctively, I turned around and started to run away,” he told the magazine. “I took about three or four steps, and that’s when it got me in the back.”

Mr. Stamps recalled sitting in the front seat of the ambulance for the ride to Robinson Memorial Hospital in nearby Ravenna. Behind him were Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller, both of whom died from their wounds. … Read full obituary

September ?, 1939 - May 31, 2008

Glamorous and scandal-prone newspaper columnist who confessed to being the long-term mistress of the Irish Prime Minister

Terry Keane, the mistress of the former Taoiseach Charles Haughey, created a sensation in May 1999 when she went on Irish television giving details of their affair, which had gone on for 27 years and had long been the subject of speculation, much of it fanned by herself. She followed on with extracts from a forthcoming book in The Sunday Times containing rather intimate photographs for which she received £50,000. The book never appeared. … Read full obituary

A former state senator who had failed to return her friends’ phone calls was found dead in her Adams County house Thursday after the sheriff’s office was asked to do a check.

Friends of Joan Johnson, both Democrat and Republican, are mourning her her death. She was 64. …

Friends say Johnson got sick with what seemed like respiratory flu after a trip to Las Vegas earlier this month. …

Johnson was born Dec. 4, 1943, in Denver, and graduated in 1965 from the University of Colorado. She served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Tehran, Iran, in 1966. The Adams County Democrat was twice elected to the state Senate, in 1990 and 1994. … Read full obituary

ATLANTA (AP) — Hamilton Jordan, a political strategist from south Georgia who helped propel Jimmy Carter to the White House and served as his chief of staff, died Tuesday after a long battle with cancer.

Jordan, 63, died at his home in Atlanta about 7:30 p.m., said Gerald Rafshoon, who was Carter’s chief of communications. …

Jordan’s battle with cancer began 22 years ago, when he was diagnosed with lymphoma, followed by bouts with melanoma and prostate cancer. …

Carter said in a statement that he and his wife, Rosalynn, “are deeply saddened. … Hamilton was my closest political adviser, a trusted confidant and my friend. His judgment, insight and wisdom were excelled only by his compassion and love of our country.”

Jordan was born in Charlotte, N.C., in 1944 and raised in Albany, Ga. He graduated from the University of Georgia with a political science degree in 1967 and became a key adviser to Carter during the 1976 presidential campaign. …Read full obituary

Veteran Labour MP Gwyneth Dunwoody, the longest-serving female member of parliament, died last night at the age of 77 after a short illness.

A formidable and well-respected Commons figure who championed backbench rights and shot to prominence as the chair of the transport select committee, Dunwoody was taken ill a week ago and died peacefully yesterday evening, according to her son. …

The MP for Crewe and Nantwich came from political stock. Both her grandmothers were suffragettes, her father, Morgan Phillips, was general secretary of the Labour party and her mother, Norah Phillips, served in the Lords before being made Lord Lieutenant of London. …

She was often a thorn in New Labour’s side…

“For me,” she said in 2005, “parliament is not only the most important forum for the British people, it is also the last defender of the rights of all citizens.” … Read full obituary

See also:
GwynethDunwoody.co.uk

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) Former state GOP Chairman Dan Ross, the man credited with creating South Carolina’s first-in-the-South Republican presidential primary, is dead at 83.

Ross died at a Barnwell County nursing home, Barnwell County coroner Lloyd B. Ward said Wednesday.

Ross chaired the state party from 1976 to 1980 after running the 1974 campaign of former Gov. James Edwards. Edwards was the first Republican governor elected in South Carolina since the 1890s. … Read full obituary

English-born Northern Ireland minister whose political career was cut short by the outbreak of the Troubles

Captain William Long had the bad luck to be Home Affairs Minister of Northern Ireland when the Troubles exploded there in the late 1960s. His tenure was brief, from December 1968 until March 1969.

Part of his job was responsibility for keeping order during the many sectarian parades held annually in the Province, which tended to inflame the passions of the participants and those excluded. …

Captain William Long, OBE, politician and fisherman, was born on April 23, 1922. He died on February 10, 2008, aged 85 … Read full obituary

GREEN ISLAND — Francis “Len” Real, a public servant in the community throughout the 1980s and `90s, died Sunday. He was 86. …

Real was a lifelong resident of Green Island. …

In his free time, besides entering politics, he worked as a technical advisor for the 1984 Olympics in Lake Placid. He convinced the organizers to include Green Island on the route when the Olympic torch passed through the area. … Read full obituary

Where is Green Island?