BERLIN (Reuters) - Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager, believed to be the last surviving member of an unsuccessful 1944 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, has died at the age of 90.
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The German Defense Ministry issued a statement on Friday saying Boeselager had died on Thursday night. No cause of death was given.

Boeselager was just 25 when he and a group of other officers, led by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, attempted to kill Hitler with a briefcase bomb at his “Wolf’s Lair” headquarters in eastern Prussia on July 20, 1944.

The bomb went off, killing four men, but the Fuehrer was shielded from the blast by a heavy oak table and only slightly injured. Stauffenberg and most of his co-conspirators were executed within days.

But despite brutal torturing by the Nazis, none of them revealed the role of Boeselager, who had provided the explosives used in the assassination attempt, and his participation in the plot remained secret until after the war.

He carried cyanide on him every single day until the war ended, convinced the Nazis would eventually find him out.

The plot to kill Hitler has become a famous symbol for German resistance to the Nazi regime, discussed in school lessons and honored in museums. A movie about the plot called “Valkyrie,” and starring Tom Cruise as Stauffenberg, is due out later this year.

In a 2004 interview with Reuters, Boeselager said his sleep remained troubled, 60 years later, by dreams of the failed plot and visions of his fellow conspirators.

“If you are the only one among some 100 who is still alive, that makes you think. I feel they are watching me and I have a certain responsibility towards them,” he said.

After the war, Boeselager studied economics and became a forestry expert. He urged young people to get politically involved and feel responsible for their country.

(Writing by Noah Barkin; editing by Sami Aboudi)

By RICHARD PYLE, Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK - 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, his former colleague said.

Dith, 65, 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.

Dith was working as an interpreter and assistant for Schanberg in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, when the Vietnam War reached its chaotic end in April 1975 and both countries were taken over by Communist forces.

Schanberg helped Dith’s family get out but was forced to leave his friend behind after the capital fell; they were not reunited until Dith escaped four and a half years later. Eventually, Dith resettled in the United States and went to work as a photographer for the Times.

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.

“That was the phrase he used from the very first day, during our wondrous reunion in the refugee camp,” Schanberg said later.

With thousands being executed simply for manifesting signs of intellect or Western influence — even wearing glasses or wristwatches — Dith survived by masquerading as an uneducated peasant, toiling in the fields and subsisting on as little as a mouthful of rice a day, and whatever small animals he could catch.

After Dith moved to the U.S., he became a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and founded the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project, dedicated to educating people on the history of the Khmer Rouge regime.

He was “the most patriotic American photographer I’ve ever met, always talking about how he loves America,” said AP photographer Paul Sakuma, who knew Dith through their work with the Asian American Journalists Association.

Schanberg described Dith’s ordeal and salvation in a 1980 magazine article titled “The Death and Life of Dith Pran.” Schanberg’s reporting from Phnom Penh had earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1976.

Later a book, the magazine article became the basis for “The Killing Fields,” the highly successful 1984 British film starring Sam Waterston as the Times correspondent and Haing S. Ngor, another Cambodian escapee from the Khmer Rouge, as Dith Pran.

The film won three Oscars, including the best supporting actor award to Ngor. Ngor, a physician, was shot to death in 1996 during a robbery outside his Los Angeles home. Three Asian gang members were convicted of the crime.

“Pran was a true reporter, a fighter for the truth and for his people,” Schanberg said. “When cancer struck, he fought for his life again. And he did it with the same Buddhist calm and courage and positive spirit that made my brother so special.”

Dith spoke of his illness in a March interview with The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., saying he was determined to fight against the odds and urging others to get tested for cancer.

“I want to save lives, including my own, but Cambodians believe we just rent this body,” he said. “It is just a house for the spirit, and if the house is full of termites, it is time to leave.”

Dith Pran was born Sept. 27, 1942 at Siem Reap, site of the famed 12th century ruins of Angkor Wat. Educated in French and English, he worked as an interpreter for U.S. officials in Phnom Penh. As with many Asians, the family name, Dith, came first, but he was known by his given name, Pran.

After Cambodia’s leader, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, broke off relations with the United States in 1965, Dith worked at other jobs. When Sihanouk was deposed in a 1970 coup and Cambodian troops went to war with the Khmer Rouge, Dith returned to Phom Penh and worked as an interpreter for Times reporters.

In 1972, he and Schanberg, then newly arrived, were the first journalists to discover the devastation of a U.S. bombing attack on Neak Leung, a vital river crossing on the highway linking Phnom Penh with eastern Cambodia.

Dith recalled in a 2003 article for the Times what it was like to watch U.S. planes attacking enemy targets.

“If you didn’t think about the danger, it looked like a performance,” he said. “It was beautiful, like fireworks. War is beautiful if you don’t get killed. But because you know it’s going to kill, it’s no longer beautiful.”

After Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia in 1979 and seized control of territory, Dith escaped from a commune near Siem Reap and trekked 40 miles, dodging both Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge forces, to reach a border refugee camp in Thailand.

From the Thai camp he sent a message to Schanberg, who rushed from the United States for an emotional reunion with the trusted friend he felt he had abandoned four years earlier.

“I had searched for four years for any scrap of information about Pran,” Schanberg said. “I was losing hope. His emergence in October 1979 felt like an actual miracle for me. It restored my life.”

After Dith moved to the U.S., the Times hired him and put him in the photo department as a trainee. The veteran staffers “took him under their wing and taught him how to survive on the streets of New York as a photographer, how to see things,” said Times photographer Marilynn Yee.

Yee recalled an incident early in Dith’s new career as a photojournalist when, after working the 4 p.m. to midnight shift, he was robbed at gunpoint of all his camera equipment at the back door of his apartment.

“He survived everything in Cambodia and he survived that too,” she said, adding, “He never had to work the night shift again.”

Dith spoke and wrote often about his wartime experience and remained an outspoken critic of the Khmer Rouge regime.

When Pol Pot died in 1998, Dith said he was saddened that the dictator was never held accountable for the genocide.

“The Jewish people’s search for justice did not end with the death of Hitler and the Cambodian people’s search for justice doesn’t end with Pol Pot,” he said.

Dith’s survivors include his companion, Bette Parslow; his former wife, Meoun Ser Dith; a sister, Samproeuth Dith Nop; sons Titony, Titonath and Titonel; daughter Hemkarey Dith Tan; six grandchildren including a boy named Sydney; and two step-grandchildren.

Dith’s three brothers were killed by the Khmer Rouge.

___

AP News Research Center contributed to this report.

By Ona Zachary
Israel “Cachao” Lopez, the Cuban bassist and composer who has invented the mambo music style, died Saturday at the age of 89.

Known by his fans as Cachao, the composer fell ill in the past week from kidney failure and died surrounded by his family at the Coral Gables Hospital, as Reuters reports.

Cachao was born in Cuba in 1918, in the middle of a musical family and he had already become a very talented bassist as a teenager. He left the communist country in the early 1960s and went to the United States, where he performed until the last months of his life.

In the 1930s, while experimenting with his multi-instrumentalist brother Orestes Lopez, he discovered mambo, which resulted from the two brothers’ improvisational work with danzon, and elegant musical style popular in that age. In an interview with the Miami Herald in 1995, Cachao said that he and his brother had first created a faster type of mambo, but they had to invent a slower version so the people could dance on it.

“We would take turns at the piano and try things out,” Cachao said in the above mentioned interview. “And that’s how things came up. We realized then that this rhythm was not common. And it was faster than it is today. . . . But it was too fast for dancing, and we were six months without any work. People didn’t like it. When we slowed it down, then it became danceable.”

The bassist went through a period of obscurity in the 1980s, after moving to Miami. But his career revived in 1990, following the documentary  “Cachao … Como Su Ritmo No Hay Dos” (Like His Rhythm There Is No Other), made by the Cuban-American actor Andy Garcia. Garcia was a great admirer of Cachao, whom he considered the  “musical father” of Cubans.

After regaining popularity, Cachao released several successful albums and even won a Grammy for his album  “Ahora Si!” in 2004. The father of mambo was also honoured with a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame in 2003.

“Imagine, this is for all of you. I want to dedicate this award not only to my country, but all Latin America and the United States,” he said, in his acceptance speech.

The funeral services for the Cuban musician were scheduled for Wednesday.

[Source: efluxmedia]

CHARLOTTE, N.C. - Ivan Dixon, an actor, director and producer best known for his role as Kinchloe on the 1960s television series “Hogan’s Heroes,” has died. He was 76.
Dixon died Sunday at Presbyterian Hospital in Charlotte after a hemorrhage and of complications from kidney failure, said his daughter, Doris Nomathande Dixon of Charlotte.

Actor Sidney Poitier said the two men became friends after Dixon was his stunt double in the 1958 movie “The Defiant Ones.”

“As an actor, you had to be careful,” Poitier said in a statement. “He was quite likely to walk off with the scene.”

Dixon began his acting career on Broadway in plays including “The Cave Dwellers” and “A Raisin in the Sun.” On film, he appeared in “Something of Value,” “A Raisin in the Sun,” “A Patch of Blue,” “Nothing But a Man” and the cult favorite “Car Wash.”

But he was probably best known for the role of U.S. Staff Sgt. James Kinchloe on “Hogan’s Heroes,” a satire set in a German prisoner-of-war camp during World War II. Kinchloe, in charge of electronic communications, could mimic German officers on the radio or phone.

While her father was most proud of work in plays such as “A Raisin in the Sun” and for films such as “Nothing But a Man,” he had no mixed feelings about being recognized for the role of Kinchloe, his daughter said.

“It was a pivotal role as well, because there were not as many blacks in TV series at that time,” Nomathande Dixon said. “He did have some personal issues with that role, but it also launched him into directing.”

Dixon also earned an Emmy nomination for his performance in the CBS Playhouse special “The Final War of Olly Winter.”

In addition to acting on television, he also directed hundreds of episodic shows, including “The Waltons,” “The Rockford Files,” “Magnum, P.I.” and “In the Heat of the Night.”

Born April 6, 1931, in New York City, Dixon graduated in 1954 from North Carolina Central University in Durham.

His honors include four NAACP Image Awards, the National Black Theatre Award and the Paul Robeson Pioneer Award from the Black American Cinema Society. He was a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Directors Guild of America, the Screen Actors Guild of America and the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame.

In addition to his daughter, survivors include his wife of 53 years, Berlie Dixon of Charlotte, and a son, Alan Kimara Dixon of Oakland, Calif. Two sons, Ivan Nathaniel Dixon IV and N’Gai Christopher Dixon, died previously.

At Dixon’s request, the family said, no memorial or funeral is planned.

LONDON - Oscar-winning director Anthony Minghella has died, his agent said Tuesday.
Agent Judy Daish confirmed the director’s death but further details were not immediately available.

Minghella, who was 54, won an Oscar for directing “The English Patient,” one of a series of literary adaptations that include “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and “Cold Mountain.” He was recently in Botswana filming an adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith’s novel “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.”

[Source: Yahoo News]