DALLAS (AP) — Nobel Prize-winning agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug died in Texas Saturday. He was 95.
Known as the father of the "green revolution," Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in combating world hunger.
Texas A&M University spokeswoman Kathleen Phillips said Borlaug died just before 11 p.m. Saturday at his home in Dallas.
The Nobel committee honored Borlaug in 1970 for contributions to high-yield crops and other agricultural innovations in the developing world. Many experts credit his green revolution with averting global famine during the second half of the 20th century.
The Iowa-born Borlaug remained active well into his 90s, campaigning for the use of biotechnology to fight hunger and working on projects to alleviate poverty.
HAVANA (AP) — Juan Almeida Bosque, a vice president who was one of the last giants of Cuba's 1959 revolution, has died. He was 82.
A statement in government media said Almeida died of a heart attack late Friday. The government declared a national day of mourning to begin at 8 a.m. Sunday and ordered all flags flown at half-staff.
Almeida was one of three surviving rebel leaders who still bore the honorary title "Commander of the Revolution" and a highly visible member of Cuba's thinning old guard, most of whom are in their late 70s and early 80s.
Almeida was the only black commander among the early rebel leaders. He was a decisive voice in the battle to overthrow Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, and in the early years following the Jan. 1, 1959, triumph of the Cuban revolution.
With a full head of white hair and mustache, Almeida was a highly visible member of Cuba's ruling elite, sitting on the Communist Party's politburo and serving as a vice president on the Council of State, the country's supreme governing body. He cut back on activities in December 2003, citing heart problems.
Almeida was at Fidel Castro's side on July 26, 1953 when Cuba's future president led an armed attack on a military barracks. It was a disaster and Almeida and both Castros were imprisoned. But that failure launched the revolutionary battle that triumphed 5 1/2 years later.
Freed under an amnesty granted to the young revolutionaries, Almeida accompanied the Castros and others to Mexico, where they formed a guerrilla army. They returned to Cuba in December 1956 on the American yacht "Granma" and launched their battle from the island's eastern Sierra Maestra.
Almeida, the Castro brothers and Argentine-born Ernesto "Che" Guevara were among only 16 who survived the landing, in which government troops killed most of the rebels. "No one here gives up!" Almeida shouted to Guevara at the time, coining an enduring slogan of the Cuban revolution.
TORONTO (AP) — Pierre Cossette, who founded the modern Grammy Awards and produced the globally televised music awards ceremony for 35 years, died of congestive heart failure at a Montreal hospital. He was 85.
The Canadian producer's death was announced late Friday in Santa Monica, Calif., by the Recording Academy.
Cossette, a native of Valleyfield, Quebec, was an accomplished television and theater producer, but he is best known for guiding the Grammy Awards from its early days as a stuffy, unsuccessful production to the industry institution it has become.
In its early years, the Grammy show was an hourlong compilation of recorded performances, and it was not a commercial success. When the production rights became available in 1971, Cossette already had a successful career in the music business as a producer and manager.
He had the ambitious idea to turn the show into a grand musical showcase full of live performances, but he had difficulty selling networks on his vision. Executives were particularly skeptical that there was an audience for a performance-based TV show. But Cossette — nicknamed "Showbiz" — persevered.
The Grammy Museum, which opened in December 2008, is called the Pierre Cossette Center and contains a corner exhibit dedicated to him.
Cossette produced the Grammy Awards until 2005, when his son took over the job for Cossette Productions.
CINCINNATI (AP) — Rabbi Alfred Gottschalk, the former president and chancellor emeritus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, has died. He was 79.
Hebrew Union spokeswoman Jean Bloch Rosensaft says Gottschalk died Saturday.
Gottschalk was born in 1930 in Oberwesel, Germany. The school says he and his parents emigrated from Nazi Germany in the late 1930s to New York.
Hebrew Union is the seminary for Reform Judaism in the U.S. Gottschalk worked at the school from 1959 through 2000. The school says Gottschalk ordained the first female rabbis in both the U.S. and in Israel.
CHICAGO (AP) — Christopher G. Kelly, a former chief fundraiser for ousted Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, died Saturday just days before he was to begin serving at least eight years for fraud. He was 51.
Kelly was reportedly found Friday night in a parking lot in Country Club Hills, a town near Chicago. Mayor Dwight Welch said authorities were investigating it as a suicide.
Marcel Bright, a spokesman for Stroger hospital in Chicago, said he was pronounced dead Saturday morning. The cause of death was not immediately available.
Kelly raised millions of dollars for Blagojevich's campaigns. He had pleaded not guilty to charges included in the federal indictment alleging Blagojevich sought to sell or trade President Barack Obama's former U.S. Senate seat.
He was due to report next Friday to start serving a three-year federal prison sentence after pleading guilty to tax fraud charges that included writing off thousands of dollars in gambling debts as business expenses.
The commercial roofing contractor had also pleaded guilty Tuesday to taking part in an $8.5 million fraud against United Airlines and American Airlines for work on their hangars at O'Hare International Airport. A plea agreement with federal prosecutors called for him to serve a five-year prison sentence on top of the three years for tax offenses.
He also faced charges in the sweeping Blagojevich indictment that alleged he plotted with Blagojevich to use the muscle of the governor's office to squeeze payments out of those seeking state business.
SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) — Danny Pang, an Orange County financier who was the subject of a fraud investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, has died. He was 42.
The Orange County coroner's office says Pang died Saturday at a hospital, one day after being taken from his Newport Beach home by paramedics. An autopsy is scheduled Sunday to determine the cause of death.
Pang pleaded not guilty in July to federal charges of evading currency reporting laws.
In a separate case, Pang was accused of cheating investors and running his Irvine company, Private Equity Management Group, like a Ponzi scheme.
PARIS (AP) — Willy Ronis, the last of France's postwar greats of photography who captured the essence of Paris in black and white scenes of everyday life, died Saturday. He was 99.
Ronis died at a Paris hospital where he had been admitted days earlier, said Stephane Ledoux, the president of the Eyedea photo agency.
Lovers, nudes and scenes from Paris streets were the mainstay of Ronis' photographs, which reflect the so-called humanist school of photography in an award-winning career that began in the 1930s and reaped honors for him in France and abroad.
Ronis, along with friend Robert Doisneau and photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson, were among France's great photographers who emerged after World War II. The three along with two other photographers were honored as early as 1953 by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Ronis' genius spilled forth in his spontaneous photos of the streets of working class Paris, from its bistros to its lovers and gardens and even its strikes, always captured with a benevolent eye.
Photographs of eastern Paris, where Ronis lived, were collected in a book of the Belleville and Menilmontant neighborhoods that reached cult status in France. His photos of lovers against the Paris skyline or a nude at a wash basin also helped define him. Ronis' last photo, taken in 2001, was of a nude.
Source: AP Features
