The Vietnam War was raging when Fred Branfman went to Laos in 1967 as an international aid worker.
The revelation led him to take up a new mission when his term as an aid worker, for the nonprofit organization International Voluntary Services, ended in the summer of 1969: to bring attention to what became known as the "Secret War."
It had gone on for years — Air Force bombers attacked parts of Laos controlled by the Communist North Vietnamese, killing thousands of Laotian civilians — but it had been invisible to most Americans.
Mr. Branfman, who was 72 when he died on Sept. 24, in Budapest, became one of the first to expose the air war, publicly challenging accounts by United States officials who had initially denied the bombing campaign and later insisted that it did not target civilian areas.

Nhà thơ của "Lý ngựa ô ở hai vùng đất" Phạm Ngọc Cảnh đã qua đời hôm 21/10, hưởng thọ 80 tuổi.
Nhà thơ Phạm Ngọc Cảnh còn có bút danh: Vũ Ngàn Chi, sinh năm 1934 tại Hà Tĩnh. Ông tham gia Vệ quốc đoàn từ khi 13 tuổi (năm 1947), trở thành tuyên truyền viên văn nghệ rồi diễn viên văn công, diễn viên của Đoàn kịch nói Tổng Cục chính trị. Về công tác tại tạp chí Văn nghệ Quân đội, ông làm biên tập thơ trong 20 năm. Ông được giới văn chương đánh giá là người đa tài trên nhiều lĩnh vực. Ngoài làm thơ, ông viết kịch bản phim, làm diễn viên, tham gia giảng dạy, dẫn chương trình tọa đàm văn học…

Oscar de la Renta, the doyen of American fashion, whose career began in the 1950s in Franco's Spain, sprawled across the better living rooms of Paris and New York, and who was the last survivor of that generation of bold, all-seeing tastemakers, died on Monday at his home in Kent, Conn. He was 82.
Though ill with cancer intermittently for close to eight years, Mr. de la Renta was resilient. During that period his business grew by 50 percent, to $150 million in sales, as his name became linked to celebrity events like the Oscars. Amy Adams, Sarah Jessica Parker and Penélope Cruz were among the actresses who wore his dresses.
Recently his biggest coup was to make the ivory tulle gown that Amal Alamuddin wore to wed George Clooney in Venice.

Efua Dorkenoo, who helped lead a successful 30-year campaign against the tradition of genital cutting of girls and women, mainly in Africa and the Middle East, by casting the practice as a human rights violation, died on Oct. 18 in London. She was 65.
She wrote articles and an influential book — "Cutting the Rose: Female Genital Mutilation" (1996) — and lobbied the British government and international organizations. She also knocked on doors in London immigrant neighborhoods and African villages to spread her message.

TTO - Nhà thơ Lưu Trùng Dương vừa qua đời ở tuổi 84 tại nhà riêng (TP.HCM) lúc 8g ngày 9-10 sau 2 năm bệnh do già yếu.
Ông là em của nhà thơ, soạn giả Lưu Quang Thuận và chú ruột nhà thơ, nhà viết kịch Lưu Quang Vũ. Ông còn có các bút danh Trần Hướng Dương, Trần Thế Sự, Lưu Ly…
Ông tham gia cách mạng từ rất sớm, là Hội viên Hội Nhà văn Việt Nam, Hội viên Hội Nhà văn Đà Nẵng, nguyên Phó chủ tịch thường trực, Bí thư Đảng Đoàn Hội Văn nghệ Quảng Nam - Đà Nẵng, Tổng thư kí Hội Văn nghệ TP.Đà Nẵng.

Jean-Claude Duvalier, a former president of Haiti known as Baby Doc who ruled the country with a bloody brutality and then shocked it anew with asudden return from a 25-year exile in 2011, died on Saturday.
Mr. Duvalier, 63, died of a heart attack in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, at a private residence where he was staying, his lawyer told The Associated Press.

Judith Deena Hochberg was born on Sept. 16, 1923, in Brooklyn to immigrants from Eastern Europe. Her childhood fascination with building turned into a desire to become an architect when she visited an architect's office as a junior in high school. The desire solidified when an injury prevented her from dancing, her first love.
She attended Connecticut College and New York University before earning an architecture degree from Columbia. Her class was mostly women and Latin Americans, because American men were fighting in World War II. Columbia professors, she recalled, often said, "We're wasting our time on you girls." Asked by her interviewer if they said that to the women directly, she replied, "Oh, yes."
When Ms. Edelman started looking for a job, she heard something similar. "We don't hire girls," one potential employer after another said.

Galway Kinnell, who was recognized with both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for a body of poetry that pushed deep into the heart of human experience in the decades after World War II, died on Tuesday at his home in Sheffield, Vt. He was 87.
Mr. Kinnell came of age among a generation of poets who were trying to get past the modernism of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and write verses that, as he said, could be understood without a graduate degree. He succeeded well enough that all of the volumes of poems he published from 1960 to 2008 — evocations of urban streetscapes, pastoral odes, meditations on mortality and frank explorations of sex — are still in print.

Siegfried Lenz, a German writer acclaimed for novels and stories that frankly explored his country's role in the rise of Nazism, died on Tuesday in Hamburg. He was 88.
Along with Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll and other German writers who rose to international prominence after World War II, Mr. Lenz was a member of Gruppe 47, a literary cohort that encouraged democracy, free expression and confrontation with Germany's Nazi era. His stories often placed Nazism in the context of broader German history and identity.

Ali Mazrui, a scholar and prolific author who set off a tsunami of criticism in 1986 by writing and hosting "The Africans: A Triple Heritage," a public television series that culminated in what seemed to be an endorsement of African nations' acquiring nuclear weapons, died on Oct. 12 at his home in Vestal, N.Y. He was 81.
His books and his hundreds of scholarly articles explored topics like African politics, international political culture, political Islam and globalization. He was for many years a professor at the University of Michigan, and since 1989 had held the Albert Schweitzer chair at Binghamton University, State University of New York.