Shinzo Abe, 67, the longest-serving prime minister of Japan, who sought to revive the country as an economic and military power to confront China’s rising influence, died Friday after being shot by a gunman.
The assassination, during a campaign event for party allies in Nara, near Osaka, left Japan stunned. The killing brought an outpouring of tributes around the world for Abe, the scion of a prominent political family whose stamp on Japan’s politics and international affairs spanned nearly a generation. Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party has led Japan for all but four years since the mid-1950s.
Abe brought a measure of stability as prime minister from 2012 to 2020 after years of revolving-door leadership that complicated Japan’s critical alliances, including its trade and defense ties with Washington. His long run in office, however, delivered only partial victories on his two primary ambitions: to unfetter Japan’s military after decades of postwar pacifism and to jump-start and overhaul its economy through a program known as Abenomics.
José Eduardo dos Santos, 79, who presided over Angola during a brutal civil war and navigated the crosscurrents of the Cold War to last 38 years as president, becoming one of Africa’s longest-serving and most rapacious tyrants, died Friday at a clinic in Barcelona. News reports said he had been traveling to Spain for several years for cancer treatment.
During his nearly four decades in power, from 1979 to 2017, dos Santos led his resource plentiful nation through seemingly endless conflict and an uneasy peace marked by corruption that funneled vast riches to his family and a favored few while leaving most Angolans in dismal poverty. Dos Santos was eventually forced into exile — to a $7.2 million mansion in Barcelona — after his successor, President João Lourenço, unexpectedly launched an anti-corruption crackdown that closed in on the long-untouchable dos Santos family and its associates.
James Caan, 82, a Hollywood leading man of the 1970s who memorably displayed his tough-guy screen presence as the trigger-happy Mafioso Sonny Corleone in “The Godfather,” but who also proved, beyond his macho exterior, a versatile performer of wry expressiveness and unexpected vulnerability, died Wednesday. His death was announced in a message by his official Twitter account. Additional details were not immediately available.
Film critic Roger Ebert admiringly called him “the most wound-up guy in the movies,” a description Caan did not dispute. He maintained his strut and bravado off-screen, earning a black belt in karate and pursuing hobbies such as powerboat racing and roping steers. Shortly after the box-office success of “Misery” (1990), in which Caan played a novelist held captive by a hammer-wielding deranged fan, Caan joked that director Rob Reiner had indulged in a sadistic game by forcing him — “the most hyper guy in Hollywood” — to perform the role tied to a bed over 15 weeks of filming. His breakout role was the terminally ill Chicago Bears running back Brian Piccolo in the TV film “Brian’s Song” (1971).
Kazuki Takahashi, 60, the creator of the “Yu-Gi-Oh” manga, anime and trading card phenomenon, was found dead Wednesday, floating off the southern Japanese coast of Nago in snorkeling gear, according to the nation’s coast guard and reported by local broadcaster NHK. In 2011, Guinness World Records recognized “Yu-Gi-Oh!” as the biggest trading-card game ever, with more than 25 billion cards sold, according to the game maker Konami. Takahashi received the Inkpot Award from San Diego’s Comic-Con International in 2015.
Chris Thompson, 62, who was paralyzed while playing football for West Seattle High School in 1975 and was awarded $6.3 million in 1981 after filing a lawsuit against Seattle Public Schools, died from natural causes Monday in Seattle. He graduated from the University of Washington and owned horses that raced locally at Longacres in Renton and Emerald Downs in Auburn.
Thompson was named athlete of the year at Madison as a ninth grader, and was the starting halfback for the West Seattle High football team as a sophomore. He was racing toward the end zone when he collided with a pair of tacklers. Thompson was unable to get up after suffering a spinal cord injury that left him quadriplegic. He was hospitalized for six months and eventually regained some use of his arms.
Thompson sued the school district, contending that coaches had not instructed him to avoid running with his head lowered. John Good, a friend of Thompson’s since junior high, said Thompson negotiated a lower settlement after the district’s insurance company threatened to appeal the $6.3 million judgment. But the ruling in Thompson’s favor helped pave the way for safety changes in the game.
Joe Turkel, 94, an actor best known for playing spooky bartender Lloyd in “The Shining” and an android maker in “Blade Runner,” died Monday in Santa Monica, California, ending a prolific career that included more than 100 film and television roles.
On the small screen, Turkel was often cast alongside tough guys in cop shows including “S.W.A.T.,” “Adam-12,” and “Dragnet” as well as Westerns like “The Lone Ranger,” “Bonanza,” and “The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp.” IMDB says that his last screen appearance was in the futuristic 1990 sci-fi film “The Dark Side of the Moon,” which is set in 2022.
Clifford L. Alexander Jr., 88, whose long career as a leading adviser to Democratic presidents ranged from working behind the scenes on landmark legislation like the Voting Rights Act to high-profile roles like serving as the first Black secretary of the Army, died July 3 at his home in the New York City borough of Manhattan. His daughter, the poet Elizabeth Alexander, said the cause was heart failure.
“Cliff was an American original — a civil rights trailblazer whose eyes were never shut to injustice but whose heart was always open,” Michelle Obama said in a statement. “He was like a father to me and an inspiration to Barack. We admired the way he fought and learned from the way he led.”
Bradford Freeman, 97, the last survivor of the famed Army unit featured in the World War II oral history book and miniseries “Band of Brothers,” died July 3 in Mississippi. Freeman was an 18-year-old student at Mississippi State when he enlisted to fight in World War II. He volunteered to become a paratrooper and became a mortar man in Company E, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. He parachuted into Normandy on D-Day, fought in Operation Market-Garden and was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge, later participating in the occupations of Berchtesgaden, Germany, and Austria.
Peter Brook, 97, a visionary English theater director who staged groundbreaking productions on both sides of the Atlantic, helping to demonstrate his belief that the trappings of conventional theater — the red curtain, the music, the costumes, the spotlight — were inessential to the art form, died July 2 in Paris. He was a towering figure in international theater, widely described as the most influential director of his generation. His work ranged from the minimalist to the grandiose, from a stripped-down staging of Bizet’s opera “Carmen” to a nine-hour adaptation of the Sanskrit epic the “Mahabharata,” which he originally staged at a limestone quarry complete with an artificial lake.
Miguel Etchecolatz, 93, a notorious police henchman in Argentina’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship who was convicted of prominent roles in baby snatching as well as the abduction of 10 high school students — a crime that became known as the “Night of the Pencils” — died July 2 at a clinic in Buenos Aires.
The arc of Etchecolatz’s infamy, as a junta enforcer and later for his unrepentant defiance after Argentina’s return to democracy, was a study in the country’s struggle for a full reckoning over the atrocities committed during the dictatorship. Human rights groups estimate as many as 30,000 people were killed or “disappeared,” and many more were tortured under the direction of Etchecolatz.
Vladimir Zelenko, 48, a self-described “simple country doctor” from upstate New York who rocketed to prominence in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when his controversial treatment for the coronavirus gained White House support, died June 30 in Dallas. His wife, Rinat, said he died of lung cancer at a hospital where he was receiving treatment.
He was not the first physician to promote hydroxychloroquine. But he began to draw national attention on March 21, 2020 — two days after President Donald Trump first mentioned the drug in a press briefing — when Zelenko posted a video to YouTube and Facebook in which he claimed a 100% success rate with the treatment. He implored Trump to adopt it.
Willie Lee Morrow, 82, a son of Alabama sharecroppers who built a business empire around hair care products aimed at African American consumers, among them a comb designed to work with the natural styles that exploded in popularity in the 1960s — a tool he called the Afro Tease, but which came to be known as the Afro pick — died of pneumonia on June 22 in San Diego.