Dead Celebrity Alert

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?

Former U.S. representative Bill Dickinson, who came to office in the election in which Barry Goldwater helped turn Alabama into a two-party state, died March 31. He was 82. … He had colon cancer.

Mr. Dickinson, a former judge in city, juvenile and circuit courts in Opelika, Ala., was one of several Democrats recruited to change parties in 1964 and run as Republicans for Congress in a state that had been solidly Democratic for a century.

In an election set against a Deep South backlash to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee, carried Alabama and helped Republicans claim five of Alabama’s eight seats in the U.S. House. …

Mr. Dickinson was reelected every two years until he decided to retire in 1992 and settle in Montgomery. …

Mr. Dickinson served on the House Armed Services Committee, where he became the ranking Republican member. He was an ardent defender of military spending during the Vietnam War and protected military bases that were an important part of Alabama’s economy. … Read full obituary

1:15 p.m. April 11, 2008 BAKERSFIELD — Joe Shell, a former Assemblyman who mounted a colorful campaign challenging Richard Nixon for the 1962 Republican gubernatorial nomination, has died. He was 89.

Shell, a conservative who served for five years as the GOP minority leader in the California Assembly, had been in declining health since breaking several ribs in January…

During his unsuccessful campaign for governor, Shell piloted his own Beechcraft Bonanza from one campaign stop to the next with a pet poodle at his side in the cockpit, emphasizing an ultraconservative platform that ultimately split loyalties in the GOP. …

Shell accused his primary opponent, former Vice President Nixon, of trying to use Sacramento as a way to get back to Washington. Shell won 35 percent of the vote and Nixon lost to Democratic incumbent Pat Brown in the general election. … Read full obituary

Former state judge Stewart Hanson Jr., 69, died March 30, 2008.

Mr. Hanson was perhaps best known for presiding over the 1976 Utah aggravated kidnapping trial of Ted Bundy and sentencing Bundy to up to 15 years in prison. Serial killer Bundy later was extradited to Colorado, where he escaped from jail, went on a crime spree and was eventually executed for murder in Florida.

Mr. Hanson was the Democratic nominee for governor in 1992. … Read full obituary

Ameriquest Mortgage founder Roland E. Arnall, 68, a billionaire who became a symbol of the subprime lending industry he helped create, died March 17 at the University of California at Los Angeles Medical Center. Esophageal cancer was diagnosed…

Mr. Arnall, a Holocaust survivor who co-founded the Simon Wiesenthal Center, had resigned as President Bush’s ambassador to the Netherlands on March 7, returning to Los Angeles to be with a seriously ill son who had Hodgkin’s disease.

Intensely private about his business and charitable affairs, Mr. Arnall built a real estate and financial services empire that transformed him into one of the nation’s wealthiest people, with his fortune estimated last year at $1.5 billion by Forbes magazine.

Once the nation’s largest subprime mortgage lender, Ameriquest was shadowed by accusations that it engaged in improper practices that included lying about borrowers’ income to qualify them for loans they couldn’t afford. Ameriquest advertised heavily on television, sent blimps soaring above stadiums bearing the company’s name and Liberty Bell logo and sponsored a Super Bowl halftime show and a Rolling Stones tour. …

A major supporter of Bush and Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mr. Arnall and his second wife, Dawn, gave more than $12 million to GOP causes and candidates, becoming the heaviest donors to the 2004 election cycle, according to campaign finance records.

Mr. Arnall said he backed Bush because of his support for Israel. … Read full obituary

Dr Patrick Hillery was President of Ireland from 1976 until 1990. Before that he had held several important ministries in Irish governments, including Foreign Affairs, and was the Republic of Ireland’s first Commissioner in the European Economic Community after accession in 1973.

Hillery became President after Cearbhall O Dalaigh had resigned following a verbal attack upon him by an inebriated Minister for Defence to which the Government failed to respond either by an apology or by dismissing the minister.

Unlike most former presidents Hillery was elected unopposed and so had not received public endorsement. This may have contributed to his lack of popular appeal. At the end of his two terms — he was re-elected unopposed in 1983 — it was being asked whether the presidency served any useful purpose.

In 1990 Mary Robinson campaigned successfully to succeed him on a platform of an active presidency and a change from the practice of treating it as a retirement post for senior politicians. … Read full obituary

Anglican minister who pursued his vocation in tandem with a political career in three parties

Lord Beaumont of Whitley became the Green Party’s only member of either House of Parliament in 1999 after spending most of his life and a good deal of his fortune helping the Liberal and then Liberal Democrat Party. In his long career he had alternated between the church and politics. …

Lord Beaumont of Whitley, priest and politician, was born on November 22, 1928. He died on April 8, 2008, aged 79 … Read full obituary

Annemarie Renger was the first woman to become president (Speaker) of the Bundestag (lower house of the German parliament). She won wide acclaim during her four years in the post. She had a dominant grasp of procedure, was crisp and clear in her rulings and utterly unyielding in her imposition of discipline. Behind her usually unfailing courtesy lay an iron determination. As Norbert Lammert, the present Speaker, put it: “She acted with as much dignity as decisiveness in the chair.”

When her party, the Social Democrats, lost its tenuous majority again in the Bundestag and the speakership reverted to the Christian Democrats in 1976, Renger remained a deputy Speaker until she gave up her seat in 1990 at the age of 70. …

Annemarie Renger, parliamentarian and Speaker of the Bundestag, was born on October 7, 1919. She died on March 3, 2008, aged 88 … Read full obituary

Former Hawke Government Minister John Button has died at the age of 74.

Mr Button served as a Victorian Senator between 1974 and 1993, and was a Senior Minister in the former Hawke Labor Government.

Acting Prime Minister Julia Gillard today confirmed his death, saying that he was an honest and frank man. …

Mr Button is also credited with playing a pivotal role in the election of Bob Hawke as the nation’s Prime Minister, persuading then Opposition Leader Bill Hayden to step down just before the election. … Read full obituary

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Former Rep. Bill Dickinson, a Democrat-turned-Republican who championed a strong defense and helped make Alabama a two-party state, has died. He was 82.

Longtime aide Walter Bamberg said Tuesday that Dickinson, who served in the House from 1965 to 1993, died Monday at his Montgomery home after suffering from colon cancer.

Dickinson, a former judge in city, juvenile and circuit courts in Opelika, was one of several Democrats recruited to change parties in 1964 and run as Republicans for Congress in a state that had been solidly Democratic for a century. … Read full obituary

MOSCOW (AP) — Joseph Stalin’s oil and gas minister Nikolai Baibakov has died at the age of 97.

Russia’s natural gas giant Gazprom says Baibakov died of pneumonia on Monday in Moscow. …

In a 1998 interview Baibakov recalled being commissioned to destroy oil wells in the Caucasus region during World War II to prevent the German army from seizing them. But he said Stalin threatened to shoot him if he destroyed the wells. … Read full obituary

Evan Mecham, the feisty, ultra-conservative Pontiac dealer whose turbulent tenure as governor deeply divided Arizona and prompted his impeachment in 1988, died [February 21] after a long illness. He was 83. …

Mecham, who served just 15 months as Arizona’s 17th governor, spent the last four years of his life in the dementia unit of the Arizona State Veteran Home, a spokesman for the home said. He was moved to the veteran’s hospital in mid-February, almost exactly 20 years from the date he was impeached by the Arizona House of Representatives. On the morning of his death, family members moved him to the hospice, his son said. …

His death closes a chapter of Arizona history that many members of the state’s political establishment would just as soon forget. … Read full obituary

WASHINGTON (AP) — Rep. Tom Lantos, who as a teenager twice escaped from a Nazi-run forced labor camp in Hungary and became the only Holocaust survivor to win a seat in Congress, has died. He was 80. …

Lantos, a Democrat who chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee, disclosed last month that he had been diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus. He said at the time that he would serve out his 14th term but would not seek re-election in his Northern California district, which takes in the southwest portion of San Francisco and suburbs to the south including Lantos’ home of San Mateo. …

Lantos, who referred to himself as “an American by choice,” was born to Jewish parents in Budapest, Hungary, and was 16 when Adolf Hitler occupied Hungary in 1944. He survived by escaping from the labor camp and coming under the protection of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who used his official status and visa-issuing powers to save thousands of Hungarian Jews.

Lantos’ mother and much of his family perished in the Holocaust. … Read full obituary

Feb. 3 (Bloomberg) — Earl Butz, the U.S. secretary of agriculture who was forced to resign after telling an obscenity-laced racist joke in 1976, died yesterday in Washington. He was 98 and the oldest living former Cabinet member. …

Butz was named to head the Department of Agriculture in 1971 by President Richard Nixon. He remained in the Cabinet under President Gerald Ford after Nixon resigned in 1974 amid the Watergate scandal. …

It was a crude joke that turned Butz into a household word and punch line on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight” show. Butz was flying from the 1976 Republican convention in Kansas City, Missouri, to California when he told his infamous story to a group that included singer Pat Boone and John Dean… Read full obituary