Aloisea Inyumba, Rwanda’s Minister for Gender and Family Promotion who has died on December 6, 2012 at her home in Kagugu near Kigali.

On 6/12/2012 Dr Richard MASOZERA lost his beloved wife, Aloisea Inyumba who has been Rwanda’s Minister for Gender and Family Promotion in the Prime Minister’s Office. His two children lost their loving and caring mother while relatives lost a much-loved and valued family member.

On my behalf and of that of my party, the Rwanda People’s Party (Ishyaka Ry’Abaturage), I would like to express my condolences and deep sympathy to Dr  Richard MASOZERA’s family for the loss their beloved one Aloisea INYUMBA.

Rwanda as a nation has lost an extraordinary daughter, sister, mother, and courageous freedom fighter with unique qualities and exceptional political insight which combined passion and love for her country.  The nation has lost an iron lady and a true revolutionary who devoted her entire life to give a voice to the voiceless. It is very sad that   Aloisea INYUMBA is gone but she has left behind a lasting legacy of the new Rwanda that we all want.

There is no single word that  can describe the enormous sacrifices made by the late  Aloisea  INYUMBA, in her struggle against ethnic  and genocide regime,  her loyalty to her country and people  and her determination to rebuild  a new  Rwanda. She committed her whole life to this cause and breathed her last breath for this cause.

At a personal level, Aloisea INYUMBA and I were both colleagues as well as political opponents.  But this did not deter us from having fruitful debates and discussions about our country. My last contact with late Aloisea INYUMBA was in April 2012, at a time when we were exchanging Easter Holiday Greetings. On that day, the late Aloisea INYUMBA exhibited her deepest frustration and regretted my inadequate action in responding to her call to return to my mother country.  Today, the late Aloisea INYUMBA is in a different world, but her warm voice calling me to return to our promised land, still comes knocking at the bottom of my heart.  

My thoughts and prayers at this time are with the Dr Richard MASOZERA’s family and friends and the people of Rwanda at this very difficult and sad moment.

May her Soul Rest in Peace

John V Karuranga, President

RwandaPeople’s Party

Facebook: John V Karuranga

www.rwandapeopleparty.org

Email: rppimvura@yahoo.com

Actor Larry Hagman who died Friday November 23, 2012.

Larry Martin Hagman who has died at the Medical City Dallas Hospital in Dallas, Texas, from complications related to Stage 4 throat cancer, was an American film and television actor best known for playing ruthless businessman J. R. Ewing in the 1980s primetime television soap opera Dallas, and befuddled astronaut Major Anthony “Tony” Nelson in the 1960s sitcom I Dream of Jeannie. His supporting film roles included appearances in Fail-Safe, Nixon, and Primary Colors. His television appearances also included a handful of short-lived other series, guest roles on dozens of shows spanning from the late 1950s up until his death, and a reprisal of his signature role on the 2012 revival of Dallas. He also occasionally worked as a producer and director on television.

Hagman was the son of the actress Mary Martin. A long-time drinker, he underwent a life-saving liver transplant in 1995, triggering a controversy that he had cut in line and had taken a liver that should have gone to someone else, possibly a child, since he was a drinker and had ruined his own health. The donor transplant rules were revised, because of this, to make sure the rich and alcoholics were not favored over children. Although Hagman was a member of a 12-step program, he publicly advocated marijuana as a better alternative to alcohol. He died on November 23, 2012 of the complications of throat cancer.

Hagman was born in Weatherford, Texas, near Fort Worth. His mother, Mary Virginia Martin, later became a Broadway actress, and his father, Benjamin Jackson “Jack” Hagman, was an accountant and a district attorney. His father was of Swedish descent. Hagman’s parents divorced in 1936, when he was five years old. He lived with his grandmother in Texas and California while his mother became a contract player with Paramount in 1938.

In 1940, his mother met and married Richard Halliday and gave birth to a daughter, Heller, the following year. Hagman attended the strict Black-Foxe Military Institute (now closed). When his mother moved to New York City to resume her Broadway career, Hagman again lived with his grandmother in California. A couple of years later, his grandmother died and Hagman joined his mother in New York. In 1946, Hagman moved back to his hometown of Weatherford, where he worked on a ranch owned by a friend of his father. After attending Weatherford High School, he was drawn to drama classes and reputedly fell in love with the stage and, in particular, with the warm reception he received for his comedic roles. He developed a reputation as a talented performer and in between school terms, would take minor roles in local stage productions. Hagman graduated from high school in 1949, when his mother suggested that he try acting as a profession.

Hagman began his career in Dallas, Texas, working as a production assistant and acting in small roles in Margo Jones’ Theater in 1950 during a break from his one year at Bard College. He appeared in The Taming of the Shrew in New York City, followed by numerous tent show musicals with St. John Terrell’s Music Circus in St. Petersburg, Florida, and Lambertville, New Jersey. In 1951, Hagman appeared in the London production of South Pacific with his mother, and stayed in the show for nearly a year. In 1952, during the Korean War, Hagman was drafted into the United States Air Force. Stationed in London, he spent the majority of his military service entertaining U.S. troops in the UK and at bases in Europe.

Meles Zenawi - Born May 8, 1955 in Adwa, Ethiopia. Died August 20, 2012 in Brussels Belgium.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi who died yesterday in a Brussels hospital aged only 57, led one of Africa’s most populous nations for more than two decades, steering it along the path of economic growth while clamping down on dissent.

He was born in 1955 in Adwa, to an Ethiopian father from Adwa, Ethiopia, and a mother from Adi Quala, Eritrea. He graduated from the General Wingate high school in Addis Ababa, then studied medicine at Addis Ababa University (at the time known as Haile Selassie University) for two years before interrupting his studies in 1975 to join the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). While a member of the TPLF, Zenawi founded the Marxist-Leninist League of Tigray. His first name at birth was “Legesse” but he eventually became better known by his nom de guerre ‘Meles’, which he later adopted in honor of a university student and a revolutionary radical who was executed by the previous government in 1975.

The TPLF was one of many armed groups struggling against Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu Hailemariam. Zenawi was elected Leader of the Leadership Committee in 1979 and Leader of the Executive Committee in 1983. He was the chairperson of both the TPLF and the EPRDF after the EPRDF assumed power at the end of the Ethiopian Civil War in 1991. He was president of the Transitional Government of Ethiopia (TGE), during which Eritrea seceded from the country and the experiment of ethnic federalism started.

Zenawi acquired an MBA (Master of Business Administration) from the Open University of the United Kingdom in 1995 and a MSc (Masters of Science) in Economics from the Erasmus University of the Netherlands in 2004. In July 2002 Meles received an honorary doctoral degree in political science from the Hannam University in South Korea.

He was married to Azeb Mesfin and was leaves three children. Azeb Mesfin is now the chair of the Social Affairs Standing Committee of Parliament, and in January 2007, she was given the “Legacy of a Dream” award for her leadership against HIV/AIDS during a ceremony held in memory of America’s civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King. In addition, Azeb Mesfin and various government agencies have addressed child mortality issues in Ethiopia. According to UNICEF, the child mortality rate in Ethiopia has declined by 40% since the current ruling party took office.

He was a rising figure in the TPLF that he helped found as a 20-year-old, which then aligned with other groups to form the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) coalition. The EPRDF entered Addis Ababa in 1991, much to the amazement of the locals. Meles led the country first as transitional president and later, after poorly contested elections in 1995, as prime minister of the renamed Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, winning renewed mandates in 2005 and 2010 in polls that rights groups said were rife with violations.

Yitzhak Shamir, the Israeli revolutionary who robbed a bank to finance the formation of a political party that went on to make him one of only two of Israel's longest serving Prime Ministers.

Israel‘s giants keep falling. With the death of Yitzhak Shamir, at age 96, in the nursing home where he was treated for Alzheimer’s Disease, the scale of the public lives that long drove Israel’s politics becomes, at least for the time it takes to read an obituary, alive again in an imagination not much fired any more by the biographies of public servants. But Shamir’s was an epic story and it is impossible to trim his life to a sentence, leaving out the prison breaks, assassinations and Holocaust. He went from robbing banks to support a terrorist organization committed to establishing a Jewish state, to serving longer as its prime minister than all but one other person.

The record-holder remains David Ben-Gurion, the erudite, socialist, and atheist founding father of Israel, who regarded Shamir as a criminal and a thug. Ben-Gurion’s longtime aide, Shimon Peres, who now stands as the last of Israel’s founding generation, would in due course share the prime ministry with the one-time outcast. At 89, Peres himself is finally immensely popular in Israel, the largely ceremonial office of the presidency fitting him like a fine suit. In person only his hands look old, an almost eerie youthfulness on display with Peres’ prodigious, elastic intellect. Each year he hosts an international conference, which always seems to include several panels on brain studies, not by coincidence his pet subject.

Who else fires the imagination? Ariel Sharon remains in his coma, kept alive by feeding tubes the six years since suffering a series of strokes while in office. A junior officer when the giants bestrode the young state, Sharon straddles the founders’ generation much as he does the line between life and death, but is crowded into their vicinity by sheer force of reputation. His great girth seemed of a piece with his rapaciousness as a warrior. Field marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, when he was still just Egypt’s defense minister, once asked one of Sharon’s aides if it was true that the great man ate an entire lamb for breakfast every morning. Told the story was apocryphal, Tantawi appeared to regard the denial as dissembling and preferred to go on believing the myth.

Shamir inspired no such legends. “They will not write or say in the eulogies of Yitzhak Shamir that he was a fierce, charismatic leader who knew how to inspire his people,” one of his successors and protégés, Ehud Olmert, wrote in Yedioth Ahronot on Sunday. The headline in Haaretz: “A modest man, an uninspiring leader – and a genuine zealot.” Yet the sweep of his life describes the arc of modern Israel — from its birth in the ashes of the Holocaust, which claimed every member of the family Shamir left in Poland when he emigrated to what was then Palestine – to the new mainstream he thrived amid as inheritor of the Likud, the party that evolved from another Jewish militia regarded as outlaws by the Labor Party mainstream Ben-Gurion led.

Shamir believed in a physically expansive Israel, one that must include the West Bank and Gaza, at the minimum. He encouraged the settlements (as did Perez) and disdained talk of a exchanging land for peace with Arabs who also claimed the territory. “There is the sense that no one had the impact that he had,” the philosopher and journalist Avishai Margalit told the Washington Post. “He was the ultimate true believer in the idea of Greater Israel.” (From TIME’s archives: an interview with Yitzhak Shamir)

Bingu wa Mutharika, President of Malawi who died April 5, 2012 aged 78 after a cardiac arrest.

Bingu wa Mutharika – who died in hospital after having a cardiac arrest early on Thursday April 5, 2012 had nursed ambitions of ruling Malawi since the dictatorship of Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda began to unravel in 1993. That ambition was first realised in May 2004 – and five years later he won a second term, with a resounding victory.

But both Dr Mutharika’s terms in office were mired in controversy. Critics demanded Mutharika’s resignation, saying he had not so much run the country as run the country into the ground. He had been accused of trampling on democratic freedoms and economic mismanagement.

In 2011, as people struggled with rising prices and fuel shortages, frustration and anger spilled over into the streets and the country experienced some of the worst riots in its history. At least 19 people were killed when police used live bullets.  In April 2011, he expelled the United Kingdom’s representative in Malawi after a diplomatic cable was leaked in which the envoy accused Dr Mutharika of becoming increasingly autocratic and intolerant of criticism.

A few months later, Britain – then Malawi’s biggest aid donor – said it was halting all aid, accusing the Malawian government of mishandling the economy and of failing to uphold human rights. The past two years have seen massive protests against Dr Mutharika. And earlier this year, Dr Mutharika told foreign donors – on which Malawi is dependent – “to go to hell”, accusing them of plotting with local groups to topple his government.

There was also plenty of domestic political drama during Dr Mutharika’s years as Malawi’s president. In 2010, he expelled his deputy Joyce Banda from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) – but had no choice but to retain her as vice-president since she was elected in 2009 as his running mate. The pair fell out over Dr Mutharika’s plans to get his brother Peter, the country’s foreign minister, accepted as the DPP’s presidential candidate for the 2014 elections.

Ms Banda formed her own People’s Party. The Malawi constitution empowered her to take over the running of the country if Dr Mutharika died in office. Donor countries warned in 2005 that a power struggle between the president and his predecessor Bakili Muluzi was diverting the government’s attention from pressing problems, including food shortages.

Dr Mutharika’s career began when Dr Banda, Malawi’s founding father, became president in 1964. Dr Mutharika became the first Malawian administrator in the civil service, which was then still dominated by the British.  But during the so-called “cabinet crisis” in the same year, he fled Malawi for fear that Dr Banda would associate him with the rebellious ministers.

Dr Mutharika’s studies took him to Zambia, India and the United States, where he eventually obtained a doctorate in economics. He then began a long career as an international civil servant, working for many international bodies, including the World Bank. During his first term, Dr Mutharika was widely praised for helping millions of the country’s poor farmers by subsidising agricultural inputs. But donors then started to warn that the government could not afford such a large-scale programme and relations started to sour.

Born Ryson Webster Thom in the southern tea-growing district of Thyolo in 1934, the schoolmaster’s son adopted the more African name of Bingu Mutharika during the 1960s when pan-Africanism was sweeping across the continent. Bingu wa Mutharika married former Tourism Minister Callista Chapola-Chimombo in 2010 after his first wife Ethel died in May 2007. He later added the prefix ‘wa’ between his names to disguise his identity from Mr Banda’s state security, who were hunting down his opponents around the world.

In 1992 he became a founding member of the then underground political pressure group, the United Democratic Front (UDF). The party was later transformed into a political party and eventually governed Malawi for 10 years after the first multi-party elections were organised.

Dr Mutharika’s first try for the presidency was in the 1999 elections but he came last among the five candidates. He disappeared from public view for a while but later resurfaced as a surprise presidential candidate for the UDF in 2004 after President Muluzi failed in his bid to be allowed a third term.

Mr Muluzi, who dubbed himself the “political engineer”, promoted Dr Mutharika to Malawians as the “economic engineer” and did all the campaigning on behalf of his protégé – so much that it was a complete surprise that the two fell out immediately after the elections. To seal the strained relations between the two former political buddies, Dr Mutharika quit the UDF in 2005 and founded his own Democratic Progressive Party.

Dr Mutharika blamed his decision to quit the UDF on his former political associates whom he accused of frowning upon his tough anti-corruption drive. The UDF had been in the forefront of attempts to impeach Dr Mutharika over accusations that he used state money to set up his party and other charges of going against the constitution. He denied the charges, saying they were politically motivated. A church-going Catholic, Dr Mutharika had four grown-up children by his Zimbabwean wife, Ethel.

Ahmed Ben Bella who has died at his home in Algiers aged 95.

Algeria’s first President and one of six historic leaders of the bloody independence struggle from France who has passed away in his family home in the capital Algiers at the age of 96, was a symbol of pan-Arabist ideology as well as the global anti-colonial movement, and president of Algeria from 1963 until he was overthrown in a military coup in 1965 by the army chief of staff, Col. Houari Boumedienne.

Until 1980 Ben Bella was under house arrest but later went into self-exile in Switzerland until 1990 when he returned to Algeria. A giant of Algeria’s independence struggle, he played only a symbolic role in the latter years of his life, heading the opposition Movement for the Democracy in Algeria Party, which competed in the aborted 1991 elections, winning just two per cent of the vote.

His party was banned in 1997 but he continued to live in Algeria, often condemning government policies. He was present when the current President Abdelaziz Bouteflika was sworn in for his third term in April 2009. Aside from Bouteflika, he was the country’s sole civilian leader and was followed by a string of generals.One of the six “historic leaders” of Algeria’s revolt against French colonial rule, Ben Bella spent 23 years of his life in French and Algerian prisons. Through most of the eight-year war of independence, Ben Bella was held in a French fortress. His liberation was one of the main Algerian demands in the drawn-out peace talks that led to the 1962 Evian agreements for Algeria’s independence.

Elected president of the newly-independent nation virtually without opposition, he enjoyed less than three years of an extravagant and erratic leadership before being overthrown in an army coup and imprisoned by Boumedienne, then army chief of staff. Until Boumedienne’s death 13 years later, Ben Bella became a “nonperson” in Algeria. No public mention of his name was allowed in Algerian media — all state-controlled. Even the official attacks on Ben Bella’s allegedly “arbitrary and wasteful” regime avoided mentioning his name.

Boumedienne died in 1978. His pragmatic and moderate successor, Chadli Bendjedid, freed Ben Bella from more than a decade of detention without trial, ultimately allowing him to go abroad with his wife Zora and their two adopted daughters. It was Ben Bella’s misfortune that he was very much a product of the colonial regime that France imposed on Algeria for 130 years. He spoke better French than Arabic, and the Arabic he spoke was colloquial rather than literary.

As a result, he had difficulty conversing with the leaders of other Arab nations. His often rousing and emotion-charged speeches as president were delivered in Algerian Arabic — which few citizens of other Arab nations fully understand — and when he wanted to stress a particular argument, he broke into French.

Ben Bella was born on Christmas Day, 1916, to a peasant family in Marnia, on Algeria’s border with Morocco. He joined the French army in his late teens, rising to the rank of senior warrant officer. He fought with distinction with the Free French Forces in Italy during World War II and won five French decorations including the prestigious Military Medal. But returning home following the allied victory in Europe, he quickly found that a war hero of Muslim origin had little future in an Algeria ruled by French settlers.

His application for enrolment as a rural policeman was rejected, while his widowed mother was denied a license to open a tobacco store in Marnia. Disillusioned, Ben Bella turned was against France and was elected municipal councillor for the anti-colonialist “Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties.” When the movement was declared illegal, Ben Bella went underground. In April, 1949, he organized a raid on the Oran central post office to finance his revolutionary activities. The raid brought him nationwide attention and Robin-Hood-like popularity among the Moslem masses.

Arrested early in 1950, he was interned near Blida but staged a dramatic escape two years later. He fled to Cairo and began planning the Nov. 1, 1954 uprising that spelled the end of colonial rule in Algeria following a bitter, eight-year war of liberation. On Oct. 22, 1956, while on a flight from Rabat to Tunis with four companions, Ben Bella’s Moroccan plane was hijacked by its own French crew and landed at Algiers’ Maison Blanche airport. Immediately arrested, Ben Bella was held prisoner in France until the Evian treaty ended the war nearly seven years later.

Throughout his imprisonment, he remained the titular head of the Algerian revolutionary movement. Algerian representatives signed the Evian treaty only after he had approved it. Throughout the first two years of independence, Algeria was disrupted by internal conflict between the guerrilla forces that had fought the French and the “exterior forces” based in neighbouring Tunisia and Morocco under Boumedienne’s command. The exterior forces were well-armed and highly trained, but had hardly fired a shot in anger throughout the war.

Although Algeria’s economy and internal political situation deteriorated rapidly, Ben Bella devoted most of his rabble-rousing speeches to external issues, attacking Israel, “American imperialism” and South Africa’s apartheid system. He staked much of his prestige on a summit conference of Asian and African countries at which he was to be host and chairman. On June 19, 1965, three days before the summit was to open, the army seized power in an almost bloodless coup. Boumedienne was proclaimed president but the summit never took place.

He leaves a widow and one child.

Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, former President of Somalia. Born December 15, 1934. Died March 22, 2012.

Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed who has died in Dubai aged 77 was born‎‎ on 15 December 1934 and was one of the founders of the Somali Salvation Democratic Front, as well as the Puntland State of Somalia, where he served as the autonomous region’s first President. In 2004, he helped establish the Transitional Federal Government, which he led as President of Somalia from 2004 until 2008.

Ahmed was born  in the city of Galkacyo, situated in the north-central Mudug region of Somalia. For his post-secondary education, he studied Law at the Somali National University in Mogadishu. Ahmed later moved abroad to pursue Military Studies. He obtained a degree in Military Topography from the Frunze War College in the former Soviet Union, and received additional military training in Italy.

Ahmed joined the Somali Army during the 1950s, and was promoted to the post of commander in 1960. As a soldier, he participated in the Somali-Ethiopian war of 1964 and was decorated for bravery. Between 1965 and 1968, Ahmed also served as Somalia’s military attaché to Moscow.

On October 15, 1969, while paying a visit to the northern town of Las Anod, Somalia’s then President Abdirashid Ali Shermarke was shot dead by one of his own bodyguards. His assassination was quickly followed by a military coup d’état on October 21, 1969 (the day after his funeral), in which the Somali Army seized power without encountering armed opposition — essentially a bloodless takeover. The putsch was spearheaded by Major General Mohamed Siad Barre, who at the time commanded the army. For refusing to support Barre’s seizure of power, Ahmed was imprisoned for several years by the new military regime.

In 1975, Ahmed was released from prison and appointed by Barre as the director of a governmental agency. He later commanded the Somali National Army’s (SNA) southern front in the Ogaden War against neighboring Ethiopia. For his efforts, Ahmed was again decorated for courage, but would remain a colonel throughout his military career.

John Njoroge Michulki, Kenyan Minister for the Environment who died yesterday of a heart attack in Nairobi, Kenya.

Cabinet Minister in Kenya credited with streamlining the chaotic Public transport sector popularly known as ‘Matatu’ industry John Michuki died of a heart attack on Tuesday night at the age of 80. The Minister, who was a close political ally of President Kibaki, died at the Intensive Care Unit of the Aga Khan Hospital, Heart and Cancer centre, Nairobi on Tuesday night.

Michuki who was until his death, the Kenyan Environment Minister, was taken ill on Sunday morning two days after returning from a London Hospital, where he had been undergoing treatment since December last year and admitted at the Aga Khan hospital after he was rushed there in critical condition.

The Government had to clarify on Monday evening that the Minister was still alive after rumours circulated in the social sites and in the streets of Nairobi that he had died. The Government through its spokesman Mr. Alfred Mutua stated in a press statement that Michuki was alive and responding well to treatment at the hospital.

President Mwai Kibaki who left last night for London to attend a conference on stabilizing Somalia broke the news of Michuki`s death and eulogized him as leader who will be remembered as a focused public servant, determined businessman and issue oriented politician.

The late Michuki was instrumental during his tenure as the Minister for Transport in bringing order to the “Matatu” industry sector by imposing tough regulations for owners and crews, popularly known as the Michuki Rules. He made sure the matatus carry only 14 passengers, drivers and conductors wear uniforms for identification, and the vehicles had speed governors and have a yellow line to identify them as public service vehicles.

At a time when he served as the Minister for Internal Security he issued a shoot to kill order to the Police on the members of the outlawed Mungiki sect who had waged a spate of criminal activities in Central, Nairobi and Parts of Rift Valley Provinces.

Perhaps the most contentious issue surrounding Michuki is the infamous ‘Shoot-to-Kill’ order against the out-lawed Mungiki sect, which he is alleged to have directed the police while he served as the Minister for Internal Security. Human Rights groups condemned the order citing that it contravened both the Police Act and general Human Rights guaranteed by the constitution. He denies the allegation and says that they are attacks by his political rivals. Michuki is alleged to have ordered the raid on the Standard Media Group in February 2007. He sparked more protest when he declared that “when you rattle a snake you must be prepared to be bitten.” In another controversial report investigating the conduct of the Artur Brothers that was made public, Michuki is alleged to have made contact with them. He categorically denies.

Marie Colvin, a Sunday Times journalist who has been killed covering the war in Syria.

Marie Colvin, one of Britain’s leading war correspondents, was killed alongside French photographer Remi Ochlik in the city of Homs when the house they were staying in was hit by government forces. Ms Colvin, who worked for The Sunday Times, stayed in the besieged city despite being ordered to get out by her editor because of the risk, her mother Rosemarie said last night. “She had to stay. She wanted to finish one more story,” her mother added. Lebanese intelligence staff were said to have intercepted communications between Syrian army officers revealing that direct orders were issued to target the building which was being used as a makeshift press centre.

Jean-Pierre Perrin, a journalist for the Paris-based Libération newspaper who was with Ms Colvin in Homs last week, said they had been told the army was ‘deliberately’ going to shell their centre. He learned of the communication after reaching Beirut. Paul Conroy, a freelance photographer with the Sunday Times, was injured in the attack. Syrian activists said the shelling claimed at least 13 lives.

Foreign Office officials summoned Syria’s ambassador in London to a meeting yesterday and said they expected immediate arrangements to be put in place for the repatriation of Ms Colvin’s body. The 56-year-old US journalist used her final dispatches to recount the human tragedy unfolding in the opposition stronghold as it came under repeated bombardments by President Bashar Assad’s forces.

Marie Catherine Colvin was born in Oyster Bay, Nassau County, on Long Island in New York State. She graduated from Oyster Bay High School in 1974 and attended Yale University, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology in 1978. She started her career a year after graduating from Yale as a midnight-to-6 a.m. police reporter for United Press International in New York City. In 1984, Colvin became the Paris bureau chief for United Press International, moving to The Sunday Times in 1985. Starting in 1986, she was the newspaper’s Middle East correspondent, and then from 1995 was the Foreign Affairs correspondent.

In 1986, she was the first to interview Muammar Gaddafi after Operation El Dorado Canyon. Although specializing in the Middle East, she also covered conflicts in Chechnya, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka and East Timor. She won the International Women’s Media Foundation award for ‘Courage in Journalism’ for her coverage of Kosovo and Chechnya. She wrote and produced documentaries, including Arafat: Behind the Myth for the BBC. She is featured in the 2005 documentary film Bearing Witness. She began wearing an eye patch after losing the sight in her left eye when coming under Sri Lankan government RPG shrapnel fire on April 16, 2001; she was attacked after calling out “journalist, journalist!” while reporting on the Sri Lankan Civil War. Colvin was also a witness and an intermediary during the final days of the war in Sri Lanka and reported on war crimes that were committed during this phase.

In 2010, Colvin spoke about the dangers of reporting on war zones at a Fleet Street ceremony honouring fallen journalists. She said: “Craters, burned houses, mutilated bodies, women weeping for children and husbands, men for their wives, mothers, children.  “Our mission is to report these horrors of war with accuracy and without prejudice. “We always have to ask ourselves whether the level of risk is worth the story. What is bravery, and what is bravado? “Journalists covering combat shoulder great responsibilities and face difficult choices. Sometimes they pay the ultimate price.”

In 2011, while reporting on the Libyan civil war, she was offered an opportunity to interview Muammar Gaddafi, along with two other journalists that she could nominate. The first international interview since the start of the war, she took along her friends Christiane Amanpour of ABC News and Jeremy Bowen of BBC News. Colvin was married twice to journalist Patrick Bishop; both marriages ended in divorce. She also married journalist Juan Carlos Gumucio, who committed suicide in 2002. She lived in Hammersmith, West London. She had no children.

In February 2012, Colvin illegally crossed into Syria on the back of a motocross motorcycle, due to the Syrian government’s attempts to prevent foreign journalists from covering the 2011–2012 Syrian uprising. Colvin was stationed in the western Baba Amr district of the city of Homs, and made her last broadcast on the evening of February 21, appearing on the BBC, Channel 4, CNN and ITN News via satellite phone.

Colvin and award-winning French photographer Rémi Ochlik were killed on February 22 by a rocket, while fleeing a temporary media building that was being shelled by the Syrian Army. Fellow journalist Jean-Pierre Perrin and other sources reported that the building had been deliberately targeted by the Syrian Army identified using satellite phone signals. On the evening of February 22, people of Homs mourned in the streets in honour of Colvin and Ochlik.

Awards

2000: Journalist of the Year: Foreign Press Association.

2000: Courage in Journalism: International Women’s Media Foundation.

2001: Foreign Reporter of the Year: British Press Awards

2010: Foreign Reporter of the Year: British Press Awards (second award).

The singer Whitney Houston who died in a Los Angeles hotel on Sunday.

Whitney Houston’s sad and sudden death on the eve of the Grammys after a well-documented history with substance abuse has plunged the media into schizophrenic mode as it wrestles with ways to praise her legacy while acknowledging her lurid end. The news on Monday, after hagiographic tributes at the Grammys on Sunday, dragged readers back to ugly reality: Whitney Houston was found submerged in her bathtub, police said. She’d been pulled from the bathwater and attempts at resuscitation were futile.  

Before that, most news organizations by and large focused on her superstardom and on her climb to the top of the music charts with a uniquely powerful and stirring voice. In the first blush of death, the pop star’s final, drug-addled decade was a parenthesis. “The real sad loss happened ten years ago,” Leo Braudy, author of “The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History,” told The Wrap. “She was the walking wounded, but the press is not going to alienate her fans by writing that. So it becomes this mixed bag between weeping on the grave and dancing on the grave.”

The timing of Houston’s death, coming as it did before music’s biggest awards show and in the same hotel as her mentor Clive Davis’ annual bash, likely played a key role in dictating the coverage. “The confluence of the timing of the death so close to the Grammys with all of the people who knew her gathered in the same place where she died exacerbates the story,” said Al Tompkins, a senior faculty member at the Poynter Institute. He added: “I wonder how the story would be different if this had happened four weeks from now. There would not be nearly the outpouring of statements and televised memorials. The story gets larger because of the event that surrounded it.”