The Rev. Willie T. Barrow, who championed civil rights for minorities, women, gay people and consumers; opposed the war in Vietnam and apartheid; and mentored generations of community organizers, including a young Chicagoan named Barack Obama, died on Thursday at her home in Chicago. She was 90.

On March 19, Mr. Ben-Jochannan died, leaving behind 13 children from three marriages and a generation of intellectuals and activists who looked to him for guidance.
To some, Mr. Ben-Jochannan was a sage, a self-taught scholar who dedicated his life to uncovering the suppressed history of a people, challenging narratives that had written Africa out of world history.
“He is a kind of godfather to all of us in African and Afro-American studies,” Cornel West, the author and activist, said. “I salute him. I was blessed to study at his feet.”

Michael Graves, one of the most prominent and prolific American architects of the latter 20th century, who designed more than 350 buildings around the world but was perhaps best known for his teakettle and pepper mill, died on Thursday at his home in Princeton, N.J. He was 80.
Mr. Graves was first associated with the New York Five, a group of architects who achieved cult-like stature by helping to redefine modernism in the 1970s. He went on to design projects like the headquarters of the health care company Humana in Louisville, Ky., and the Portland Municipal Building in Oregon, which exemplified postmodernism with their reliance on color and ornament and made him a celebrity.

Terry Pratchett, the immensely popular British fantasy novelist whose more than 70 books include the series known as Discworld, died on Thursday at his home near Salisbury, England. He was 66.
An accomplished satirist with a penchant for sending up cultural and political tomfoolery, Mr. Pratchett created wildly imaginative alternative realities to reflect on a world more familiar to readers as actual reality.

Danny Schechter, whose media criticism became a staple of Boston radio and who went on to champion human rights as an author, filmmaker and television producer, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 72.
Mr. Schechter infused almost all his work — whether it was for alternative or mainstream media — with his deep-rooted advocacy of human rights. His cherubic, if bewhiskered, countenance belied an indomitability that began with the civil rights movement, projected him into the front lines of the campaign against apartheid in South Africa and endeared him to a generation of counterculture radio listeners as “the media dissector.” He described himself as a “participatory journalist.”
“What distinguished Schechter,” John Nichols wrote in The Nation online, “was his merging of a stark and serious old-school I. F. Stone-style understanding of media power and manipulation with a wild and joyous Yippie-infused determination to rip it up and start again.”

Yoshihiro Tatsumi, a Japanese cartoonist whose dark, psychologically astute tales helped establish the genre of adult comics and graphic novels, died on March 7 in Tokyo. He was 79.
Mr. Tatsumi is best known in the United States for the memoir “A Drifting Life,” published in Japan in 2008 and in English translation in 2009. A mammoth illustrated work, it draws heavily on the details of Mr. Tatsumi’s own early life, beginning at the end of World War II, when he was 10 and Japanese popular culture was awash in the serialized illustrated stories known as manga.

SINGAPORE — Lee Kuan Yew, who transformed the tiny outpost of Singapore into one of Asia’s wealthiest and least corrupt countries as its founding father and first prime minister, died here on Monday. He was 91.
Mr. Lee was prime minister from 1959, when Singapore gained full self-government from the British, until 1990, when he stepped down. Late into his life he remained the dominant personality and driving force in what he called a First World oasis in a Third World region.
His “Singapore model” included centralized power, clean government and economic liberalism. But it was also criticized as a soft form of authoritarianism, suppressing political opposition, imposing strict limits on free speech and public assembly, and creating a climate of caution and self-censorship. The model has been studied by leaders elsewhere in Asia, including China, and the subject of many academic case studies.

Unlike Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, Lee Kuan Yew, the longtime leader of Singapore, who died on Monday at the age of ninety-two, didn’t have an “ism” attached to his name. There is “Reaganism” and “Thatcherism,” but no “Lee-ism”—which, if you think about it, is a big gap in the English language. For the distinctive brand of authoritarian capitalism that Lee, who served as prime minister from 1959 to 1990, imposed on his tiny homeland didn’t merely propel Singapore into the ranks of the world’s wealthiest and most developed countries. It also served as a model for China, the world’s largest country, and, according to some analysts, it is set to dominate the rest of the twenty-first century.

Kiến nghị của ông Lý Quang Diệu cho đến nay chưa được thực hiện một cách có hiêu quả. Thí dụ như chuyện bộ máy nhà nước trọng dụng người tài. Thí dụ như xây dựng bộ máy công khai minh bạch. Thí dụ như xây dựng bộ máy không có tham nhũng, không dám tham nhũng, không cần tham nhũng và không thể tham nhũng! Tất cả những điều đó chúng ta chưa làm được và tôi nghĩ đấy là điều mà ông Lý Quang Diệu cũng tiếc và cá nhân tôi cũng rất tiếc cho đất nước của mình. (TS. Lê Đăng Doanh)

Trong chuyến đi tới Việt Nam năm 2007, ông Lý Quang Diệu đã gợi mở nhiều ý tưởng, đặc biệt là các ý tưởng về giáo dục. “Nếu thắng trong cuộc đua giáo dục, sẽ thắng trong phát triển kinh tế”, ông Lý Quang Diệu khẳng định.