Obituaries in the news
Obie Clark
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) -- Obie Clark, a former NAACP chapter president who helped protect black churches in the 1960s and later sought to get the Confederate battle emblem removed from the state flag, died Wednesday. He was 75.
He died at Jeff Anderson Regional Medical Center in Meridian. Friends said Clark had cancer.
He led the Meridian chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People from 1969 to 2003.
During the late 1960s, Clark helped protect black churches in Meridian against attacks by the Ku Klux Klan. Later in his tenure, he sought to change the state flag.
Clark was jeered by some whites during a hearing in 2000 when he said the flag doesn't represent all people in the state.
"Save us the humiliation, because we have a different interpretation of what the flag represents," Clark said. "Fly it every day -- every day on your porch."
In April 2001, Mississippi voters decided overwhelmingly to keep the flag with the Confederate symbol.
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Hugo Claus
BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- Hugo Claus, an artist, poet, playwright and novelist whose books painted a scathing picture of repression and hypocrisy in bourgeois Flanders, died Wednesday, his wife said. He was 78.
Claus, who had Alzheimer's disease, died by euthanasia at Middelheim Hospital in Antwerp. "He himself picked the moment of his death and asked for euthanasia," his wife, Veerle De Wit, said in a statement.
Claus produced about 200 works during his career but was best known for his classic "The Sorrow of Belgium" -- a scathing attack on social injustice, stifling family relationships and Roman Catholic repression in his native Flanders in northern Belgium.
The partly autobiographical work defined his career and shot him to prominence on the international scene.
Often writing out of anger and guilt, Claus relied on pitiless realism in his work.
Claus also directed several movies and, as a painter, belonged to the Cobra group, centering on spontaneous, intuitive painting.
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Philip Jones Griffiths
LONDON (AP) -- Philip Jones Griffiths, a photojournalist who spent years traveling across Vietnam to capture the effects of the war on its people, died Wednesday. He was 72.
Jones Griffiths, a former president of the Magnum photo agency, died of cancer at his London home, said the agency's commercial director, Rhiannon Davies.
He was perhaps best known for his book "Vietnam Inc." -- described as one of the most detailed studies of any conflict.
In one of the book's most haunting photos, he captured the image of a naked, young boy cowering and covering his ears to drown out the sound of a U.S. helicopter. He wrote that the boy went mad after witnessing his mother killed by a helicopter gunship.
Jones Griffiths was born in Wales and studied pharmacy in Liverpool. His career as a photojournalist began with a part-time job for Britain's Guardian newspaper. In 1961, he began shooting full time as a freelancer for The Observer newspaper.
He shot his first war photos in Algeria in 1962 before moving to Central Africa. He eventually ended up in Asia and joined Magnum as an associate member in 1966, beginning five years documenting the Vietnam War.
He covered the 1973 Yom Kippur war and then worked in Cambodia from 1973 to 1975.
Jones Griffiths moved to New York in 1980 to become Magnum's president, a post he held for five years.
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Gary Richard Williams
EULESS, Texas (AP) -- Gary Richard Williams, better known as pro wrestler and manager Playboy Gary Hart, died Sunday. He was 66.
Williams, of Euless, died of heart disease in a Bedford hospital, according to the Tarrant County medical examiner's office.
Born in Evansville, Ind., Williams' career spanned four decades. He began wrestling in the 1960s in Illinois and Wisconsin, according to World Wrestling Entertainment. He went on to manage Bruiser Brody, Abdullah the Butcher, Gentleman Chris Adams and others, the WWE said.
Williams met his wife, Gloria, after a match in the Fort Worth Stockyards. The best man at their 1968 wedding was the masked wrestler known as The Spoiler, said Gloria Williams, of Crowley. 