Dead Celebrity Alert

NEW YORK (AP) — Dith Pran, the Cambodian-born journalist whose harrowing tale of enslavement and eventual escape from that country’s murderous Khmer Rouge revolutionaries in 1979 became the subject of the award-winning film “The Killing Fields,” died Sunday. He was 65.

Dith died at a New Jersey hospital Sunday morning of pancreatic cancer, according to Sydney Schanberg, his former colleague at The New York Times. Dith had been diagnosed almost three months ago. …

It was Dith himself who coined the term “killing fields” for the horrifying clusters of corpses and skeletal remains of victims he encountered on his desperate journey to freedom.

The regime of Pol Pot, bent on turning Cambodia back into a strictly agrarian society, and his Communist zealots were blamed for the deaths of nearly 2 million of Cambodia’s 7 million people. … Read full obituary

The number of US troops to die in Iraq since the invasion began five years ago hit 4,000 last night after a roadside bomb in Baghdad killed four soldiers. …

A US military spokesman played down the significance of the 4,000th death, which followed a day of bombings and rocket fire across the country that killed at least 60 Iraqis and left many more wounded. …

As well as 4,000 dead, at least 29,000 US servicemen and women have been injured in the Iraq war, which entered its sixth year last week, according to the independent Web site www.icasualties.org. Underscoring the brutality of an insurgency that flared in the aftermath of the invasion, the majority of American casualties occurred after George Bush announced the end of “major combat” in Iraq on May 1, 2003. …

The 1,000th US soldier to die was in September 2004, in the midst of a presidential election that returned Mr Bush to office for a second term.

The toll climbed to 2,000 in October 2005 as Sunni Arab insurgents battled to oust the Iraqi Government, and 3,000 in December 2006, before the US President unveiled a plan to send 30,000 more troops to Iraq to quell violence that has killed tens of thousands of Iraqis and displaced millions more. … Read full story

LONDON (AP) — Philip Jones Griffiths, a photojournalist who spent years traveling across Vietnam to capture the effects of the war on its people, died Wednesday. He was 72. …

Jones Griffiths was perhaps best known for his book “Vietnam Inc.” — described as one of the most detailed studies of any conflict.

In one of the book’s most haunting photos, he captured the image of a naked, young boy cowering and covering his ears to drown out the sound of a passing U.S. helicopter. He wrote that the unnamed boy went mad after witnessing his mother killed by a helicopter gunship. … Read full obituary

REDDING, Calif. — Raymond Jacobs, believed to be the last surviving member of the group of Marines photographed during the original U.S. flag-raising on Iwo Jima during World War II, has died at age 82. …

Jacobs had spent his later years working to prove that he was the radio operator photographed looking up at an American flag as it was being raised by other Marines on Mount Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945. …

Jacobs retired in 1992 from KTVU-TV in Oakland, where he worked 34 years as a reporter, anchor and news director. … Read full obituary

RAF pilot who was awarded the Military Cross for his part in the Great Escape from Stalag Luft III

“Jimmy” James was one of 76 officers who escaped from Stalag Luft III on the night of March 24, 1944, and was fortunate not to be among the 50 executed on Hitler’s order on recapture. He was sent instead to Sachsenhausen concentration camp from where he tunnelled his way out, only to be caught again after 14 days on the run.

He was the second pilot of a Wellington bomber shot down south of Rotterdam in June 1940. Initially hopeful that German security would not be too tight, the Netherlands having been overrun only in May, he planned to acquire a boat to sail back to England, or at least get him far enough from the coast to be picked up. A Dutch farmer gave him food and shelter but for one night only as his presence was certain to become known: the local police arrested him before he could move on. …

Squadron Leader B. A. “Jimmy” James, MC, survivor of the Great Escape from Stalag Luft III, was born on April 17, 1915. He died on January 18, 2008, aged 92 … Read full obituary

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TOLEDO, Ohio — J. Russell Coffey, the oldest known surviving U.S. veteran of World War I, has died. The retired teacher, one of only three U.S. veterans from the “war to end all wars,” was 109.

Coffey died Thursday at the Briar Hill Health Campus in North Baltimore, where he had lived for the past four or five years, said Gaye Boggs, nursing director at the nursing home. No cause of death has been determined, she said Friday. His health began failing in October.

“We’re sure going to miss him,” Boggs said. “He was our most famous resident, that’s for sure.” …

Coffey never saw combat because he was still in basic training when the war ended.

The two remaining U.S. veterans are Frank Buckles, 106, of Charles Town, W.Va.; and Harry Richard Landis, 108, of Sun City Center, Fla., according to the Veterans Affairs Department. In addition, John Babcock, 107, of Spokane, Wash., served in the Canadian army and is the last known Canadian veteran of the war. … Read full obituary

WASHINGTON, July 18 — Gen. Wayne A. Downing, who fought in jungles and deserts and commanded American Special Operations forces before becoming a senior adviser to President Bush for counterterrorism, died Wednesday in Peoria, Ill., where he was born and returned to live in retirement. He was 67.

His death was confirmed by the Peoria County coroner, Johnna Ingersoll, who said General Downing, a retired four-star Army officer, was admitted to a hospital on Monday with multiple myeloma, a form of cancer, and bacterial meningitis.

After graduating from West Point in 1962, General Downing served for 34 years in uniform, including two infantry combat tours in Vietnam. He was in charge of Special Operations missions during the invasion of Panama in 1989 and commanded a joint Special Operations task force during the first Persian Gulf war, operating deep behind Iraqi lines. …

General Downing served in the 1990s as commander of the Special Operations Command, which oversees the military’s unconventional warfare units and elite counterterrorism teams.

That experience earned him an appointment by President Bush as deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism one month after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In that job, General Downing sought to coordinate the sometimes fractious efforts against terrorism.

He was said by colleagues to have been an early champion of fomenting insurrection against Saddam Hussein through a combination of Iraqi rebels supported by American commandos. As the concept circulated at the White House and Pentagon, it became known as the Downing Plan.

General Downing served less than a year in the National Security Council job. … Read full obituary

Kurt Waldheim, 88, a seemingly colorless diplomat who became secretary general of the United Nations and president of his native Austria only to be barred from the United States for suspected involvement in Nazi war crimes, died today at a Vienna hospital. He had been treated for an infection since last month.

When Waldheim was put on the Justice Department’s “watch list” of prohibited persons in 1987, it was the first time in U.S. history that the head of a friendly country had been branded an undesirable alien suspected of war crimes with the German army in World War II.

He would remain on the “watch list” for the rest of his life — which made him an international pariah despite his denials of Nazi sympathies and the high positions he had held in Austria and at the United Nations. For most of his six years in the largely ceremonial Austrian presidency, Waldheim was a virtual prisoner within his country, shunned by all but a handful of other countries.

The facts about what Waldheim did during the war years were never clearly established, and there was no clear-cut proof that he participated personally in murder or other war crimes. But there was strong evidence that he had concealed his role as a lieutenant between 1942 and 1945 with Nazi Army units involved in atrocities against Yugoslav partisans and had lied about his whereabouts during that period. … Read full obituary

Abe Weissbrodt, an attorney whose career included work at the Nuremberg war crime trials, died in a Washington hospital at age 93. He succumbed to pneumonia April 16. …

From 1946 to 1951, as an attorney for the U.S. Justice and Treasury Departments, he got confessions from I.G. Farben executives about the company’s manufacture and provision of Zyklon B for the Nazi gas chambers. He also prosecuted the Bosch Corp., a German producer of engine parts. … Read full obituary

BERLIN (AP) — Carl Friedrich von Weizsaecker, a physicist who researched atomic weapons for the Nazis and became a philosophy professor who espoused pacifism after the Second World War, died Saturday, his family said. He was 94.

Born June 28, 1912, into a prominent family of jurists and theologians, Weizsaecker studied physics and mathematics in Leipzig, Berlin and Goettingen, and became a professor of physics. His brother Richard was president of Germany from 1984 to 1994.

Weizsaecker said he worked on the atomic bomb to avoid being conscripted into the Nazi army. He also insisted in postwar interviews that he was grateful the nuclear technology was never used by the Nazis.

But a secret recording of German scientists captured by the Allies caught Weizsaecker saying, after hearing of the U.S. nuclear bombing of Japan, that, “If they were able to finish it by summer ‘45, then with a bit of luck, we could have been ready in winter ‘44-45.” … Read full obituary

Aviation historians have paid tribute to one of Britain’s most decorated World War II fighter pilots who died shortly after his last flight. Sqn Ldr Neville Duke, 85, flew 485 sorties achieving 28 air combat victories, including seven aircraft shot down in seven days.

In 1953 he broke the then world air speed record achieving 727.63mph.

Sqn Ldr Duke, from Lymington, Hants, was taken ill after flying his aircraft G-Zero with Gwen, his wife of 60 years.

He died in hospital in Surrey on Sunday after suffering an aneurysm. … Read full obituary

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Ian Tapson, one of the last survivors of a team of World War II soldiers who planned and executed a breakout from a German POW camp later immortalized in the film “The Great Escape,” has died. He was 84.

The escape was immortalized in Paul Brickhill’s book “The Great Escape” and in the movie of the same title, starring Steve McQueen, James Garner and Richard Attenborough.

South African born-Roger Bushell, a squadron leader, decided to organize a mass escape by tunneling to a point outside the perimeter fence. … Read full obituary

CHARLOTTE HALL, Md., April 2 — Lloyd Brown, the last known surviving World War I Navy veteran, died on Thursday in Charlotte Hall. He was 105.

His death, at the Charlotte Hall Veterans Home, was confirmed by his family and the United States Naval District in Washington. It came days after the death of the last known surviving American woman to serve in World War I, Charlotte L. Winters, 109.

Their deaths leave three known survivors who served in the Army, and a fourth who lives in Washington State but served in the Canadian Army, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

The fourth of nine children, Mr. Brown was born Oct. 7, 1901, in Lutie, Mo., a small farming town in the Ozarks. His family later moved to Chadwick, Mo.

In 1918, when he was 16, Mr. Brown lied about his age to join the Navy and was soon on the gun crew on the battleship New Hampshire. … Read full obituary

BOONSBORO, Md. (AP) — The last known surviving American female World War I veteran, a refined Civil War buff who met face-to-face with the Secretary of the Navy to fight for women in the military, has died. She was 109.

Charlotte Winters died Tuesday at a nursing home near Boonsboro in northwest Maryland, the U.S. Naval District in Washington said in a statement. Her death leaves just five known surviving American World War I veterans.

In 1916, Winters met with Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels to persuade him to allow women in the service, said Kelly Auber, who grew up on South Mountain, where Winters and her husband, John Winters, settled.

When the Navy opened support roles to women, Winters and her sister, Sophie, joined immediately in 1917, Auber said. By December 1918, the Naval District said more than 11,000 women had enlisted and were serving in support positions. … Read full obituary

Lucie Aubrac, a hero of the French Resistance whose dramatic life story became a hit film, has died. She was 94.

Aubrac, whose maiden name was Lucie Bernard, died Wednesday in a hospital in the Paris suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux, where she had spent the last two months, said her daughter, Catherine Vallade.

Born on June 29, 1912, in the central city of Macon, Aubrac was working as a history and geography teacher when she and her husband, engineer Raymond Samuel, helped create Liberation-Sud, one of the first networks for the Resistance fighting against the Nazi occupation of France. … Read full obituary