Sid Caesar, a comedic force of nature who became one of television’s first stars in the early 1950s and influenced generations of comedians and comedy writers, died on Wednesday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 91.

James Cahill, one of the foremost authorities on Chinese art, whose interpretations of Chinese painting for the West influenced generations of scholars, died on Friday at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 87.

Robert A. Dahl, a political scientist who was widely regarded as his profession’s most distinguished student of democratic government, died on Wednesday in Hamden, Conn. Professor Dahl, who taught at Yale for 40 years, provided a definition of politics memorized by a generation of students: “The process that determines the authoritative allocation of values.”
His definition of power also became a standard: “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do.”

I feel myself honored to have known him from the time he spent as an undergraduate at UC Irvine where he was well known as a student government activist, an anti-Prop 209 campaigner, and for spearheading the successful drive (with the UCI Vietnamese American Coalition) to kick Nike T-shirts off campus. As wrote in an autobiographical essay, he learned about Nike products being made in Vietnamese sweatshops from an episode of 48 Hours. In the boycott Nike campaign, UCI students sent over 1,000 letters to Nike CEO Phil Knight, leading UCI to cancel its apparel contract with Nike. He was "hyper-involved" in student government as he would tell me in a later interview. In fact he learned about community involvement as a student in UCI's Social Ecology program.
Born in San Jose, he grew up in a Vietnamese immigrant family - his parents came from Vietnam in the 1960s, which was earlier than most Vietnamese immigrants.

Mavis Gallant, an acclaimed short-story writer who was abandoned as a child and later left Canada for Europe, where she made her name writing about the dislocated and the dispossessed, died on Tuesday at her home in Paris. She was 91.

Mrs. Herz-Sommer, who died in London on Sunday at 110, and who was widely described as the oldest known Holocaust survivor, had been a distinguished pianist in Europe before the war. But it was only after the Nazi occupation of her homeland, Czechoslovakia, in 1939 that she began a deep study of Chopin’s Études, the set of 27 solo pieces that are some of the most technically demanding and emotionally impassioned works in the piano repertory.
Throughout her two years in Theresienstadt, through the hunger and cold and death all around her, through the loss of her mother and husband, Alice Herz-Sommer was sustained by a Polish man who had died long before. His name was Frédéric Chopin.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, perhaps the most ambitious and widely admired American actor of his generation, who gave three-dimensional nuance to a wide range of sidekicks, villains and leading men on screen and embraced some of the theater’s most burdensome roles on Broadway, died on Sunday at an apartment in Greenwich Village he was renting as an office. He was 46.

Alison Jolly, an American-born primatologist whose research in the forests of Madagascar shed new light on the evolution of social intelligence and helped disprove a longstanding scientific tenet that males were dominant in every primate species, died on Feb. 6 in Lewes, East Sussex, England. She was 76.

TTM - Theo thông tin TTM vừa nhận được, nhà văn Nguyễn Quang Sáng đã qua đời vào khoảng 16g chiều nay 13-2, hưởng thọ 82 tuổi. Đạo diễn Nguyễn Quang Dũng cho biết ba mình trút hơi thở cuối cùng tại nhà riêng ở quận 7 - TP.HCM vì tuổi già, sức yếu.
Nhà văn Nguyển Quang Sáng sinh năm 1932 tại An Giang. Tác phẩm nổi tiếng nhất của ông là Chiếc lược ngà, sáng tác năm 1966. Truyện ngắn này gắn liền với nhiều thế hệ học trò cho đến ngày nay.

Stanley Kramer’s “Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961), a courtroom drama recounting the Nazi war-crime trials in Germany in 1945-46, had an all-star cast, including Spencer Tracy, Judy Garland and Montgomery Clift. But Mr. Schell’s performance as the passionate, eloquent and ultimately furious German defense lawyer was the only one honored by the academy with an award. The film had begun as a television play, a 1959 episode of the anthology series “Playhouse 90,” in which Mr. Schell also starred.
He went on to earn two more Oscar nominations, for the title role in “The Man in the Glass Booth” (1975), a drama inspired by the trial in Israel of the Holocaust criminal Adolf Eichmann, and “Julia” (1977), based on a Lillian Hellman story about the underground in Nazi Germany.