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Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, 'a true giant of history', dies aged 91

Singapore’s founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, who led the city-state for more than three decades, has died aged 91.

Lee’s son and current prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, announced the news in the early hours of Monday morning local time, prompting a flurry of tributes from world leaders.

His son struggled to hold back tears when he made a televised address to the nation, saying Lee had built a nation and given Singaporeans a proud national identity.

Speaking in Malay, Mandarin and English, the prime minister said: “We won’t see another man like him. To many Singaporeans, and indeed others too, Lee Kuan Yew was Singapore,” he said.

Lee said that his father would lie in state from 25-28 March at Parliament House so the public could pay their respects, with the state funeral on 29 March.

He has declared a period of national mourning from 23-29 March, with state flags on government buildings at half mast until Sunday.

The People’s Action Party (PAP) – the party that Lee led to electoral victory in 1959 and which has governed Singapore ever since – set up a tribute website tributetolky.org.

Lee, a Cambridge-educated lawyer, is widely credited with building Singapore into one of the world’s wealthiest nations on a per capita basis with a strong, pervasive role for the state and little patience for dissent.

He co-founded the PAP and led the newly born country when it was separated from Malaysia in 1965.

He stepped down as prime minister in 1990, handing power to Goh Chok Tong, but remained influential as senior minister in Goh’s cabinet and subsequently as “minister mentor” when Lee Hsien Loong became prime minister in 2004.

The older Lee left the cabinet in 2011 and had cut down his public appearances in recent months due to his age and declining health. Lee was admitted to Singapore general hospital on 5 February for severe pneumonia and was later put on life support.

Lee was feared for his authoritarian tactics but insisted that strict limits on speech and public protest were necessary to maintain stability in the multi-ethnic and multi-religious country.

In a letter of condolence to Lee’s son, Singapore’s president Tony Tan said: “Mr Lee dedicated his entire life to Singapore from his first position as a legal advisor to the labour unions in the 1950s after his graduation from Cambridge University to his undisputed role as the architect of our modern Republic. Few have demonstrated such complete commitment to a cause greater than themselves.”

Richard "Richie" Benaud OBE was the voice of cricket, the voice of summer.
He died peacefully in his sleep at age 84.
Thank you Richie for your contribution to the gentleman's game.
I wish there were more like you today for this description to still be true.

Legendary blues guitarist BB King dies aged 89

Legendary blues guitarist, singer and songwriter BB King has died aged 89.

Attorney Brent Bryson said his client died peacefully in his sleep at his home in Las Vegas.

King took the blues from rural juke joints to the mainstream and influenced a generation of rock guitarists from Eric Clapton to Stevie Ray Vaughan.

King will always be linked with the Gibson guitars he named Lucille.

He was born Riley B King on September 16, 1925 in Mississippi to sharecroppers but was raised by his grandmother.

As a child, King sang in a gospel choir and bought his first guitar at the age of 12.

King was well-known for When Love Comes to Town and Since I Met You Baby.

His on-air nickname was "the Blues Boy", soon shortened to the snappier BB King.

He outlived all his fellow post-World War II blues greats – Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Jimmy Reed, Lightnin' Hopkins and John Lee Hooker – to see the rough music born in the cotton fields of the segregated South reach a new audience.

"Being a blues singer is like being black twice," King wrote in his autobiography, Blues All Around Me, of the lack of respect the music got compared to rock and jazz.

"While the civil rights movement was fighting for the respect of black people, I felt I was fighting for the respect of the blues."

King went from touring black bars and dance halls in the 1940s and '50s to headlining an all-blues show at New York's Carnegie Hall in 1970 and recording with the likes of Clapton and U2 in the '90s.

King had a deep, resonant singing voice and, despite having what he called "stupid fingers", an immediately recognisable guitar sound.

His unique style of trilling the strings with a fluttering left-hand vibrato, which he called it "the butterfly", helped shape early rock.

He delivered stinging single-note licks that brimmed with emotion and were copied by white rock guitarists including Jeff Beck and Bonnie Raitt.

King was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes in the 1980s.

He was hospitalised in April for a few days after suffering from dehydration related to the disease.

Victoria's first female premier Joan Kirner dies aged 76

Victoria's first and only female premier, Joan Kirner, has died after a battle with oesophageal cancer.

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/victo ... hefxh.html

Alan Bond dies in Perth hospital after heart surgery complications

Controversial business tycoon and former Australian of the Year Alan Bond has died in a Perth hospital.

Mr Bond, 77, died following complications from heart surgery he underwent earlier this week.

Mr Bond was part of the syndicate that won the Cup in 1983, breaking the United States' 132-year stranglehold on the title and ending the longest winning streak in the history of sport.

Mr Bond was one of WA's most prominent business figures for more than a decade and at one stage was the nation's largest brewer.

He also set up Australia's first privately funded university.

But his empire crumbled in the 1990s, eventually being bankrupted for $622 million, which still stands as the second-largest personal bankruptcy in history.

He also served time in jail for siphoning off $1.2 billion to prop up his ailing Bond Corporation.

After a 19-year absence from the nation's rich list, Mr Bond resurfaced in 2008 with a personal fortune estimated to be worth $265 million.

Veteran British actor Christopher Lee dies aged 93

British actor Christopher Lee, who devoted his long acting career to portraying villains, including Dracula in horror classics, and later appeared in the blockbuster Star Wars and Lord of the Rings franchises, has died at the age of 93.

Lee died on Sunday in hospital, where he had been treated for respiratory problems and heart failure over the preceding three weeks, British media reports said.

"I can confirm we issued a death certificate on June 8. Mr Christopher Lee died on June 7th," said a spokeswoman for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in London.

Lee's agent in an emailed statement said his family "wishes to make no comment".

Tall, pale and with a deep, resonating voice, Lee will forever be remembered for his spine-chilling performance as Dracula in the cult Hammer Horror movies.

Lee was the last English-language horror movie star in a line that traced back to silent era luminary Lon Chaney and included Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Vincent Price and Peter Cushing, Lee's regular Hammer Films co-star.

Many leading directors sought out his talents, particularly in the latter stages of his career.

He won new generations of fans after the turn of the century in some of the biggest money makers in film history.

Lee had bit parts in film, theatre and radio, although at 1.95 metres, he said he suffered from being "too tall and too foreign-looking".

His big break came when he signed with Britain's legendary Hammer studios to make The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957.

He also played the evil Count Dooku, fighting Jedi knights in Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones (2002) and Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith (2005).

Lee portrayed the power-hungry wizard Saruman in director Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy and in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014).

But he was most closely associated with the role of Dracula, dispensing with the nobility Lugosi had given the role and adopting a more beastly, lustful bearing as he dispensed with various buxom victims.

Although Lee expressed frustration at being typecast as the villain, he admitted he enjoyed the roles.

"They're more interesting, because there's a greater variety you can apply: you can be very cruel or charming, amusing or dangerous," Lee said.

Lee brought to his monsters a sense of pitifulness that he called "the loneliness of evil". Despite being a master of the horror genre, Lee did not even like the word.

"It implies something nauseating, revolting, disgusting — which one sees too often these days. I prefer the word 'fantasy'," he told the New York Times in 2002.

However, he criticised the gratuitous violence of many modern films, arguing the power of suggestion was more terrifying — something he mastered early on, scaring the wits out of viewers with his piercing gaze.

Lee was born on May 27, 1922, and took up acting on the suggestion of a cousin after serving in the Royal Air Force in World War II.

He made his film debut in 1947, launching a career that eventually spanned more than 200 movies.

Lee played the fiendish criminal genius Fu Manchu in five films, the villain Scaramanga in the James Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) and, in a rare departure from cinematic wickedness, gave life to the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes in a couple of films.

Roger Moore, who played 007 opposite Lee's villainously brilliant Scaramanga said, "It's terrible when you lose an old friend, and Christopher Lee was one of my oldest".

As part of his late-career flourish, he also appeared in Martin Scorsese's Hugo (2011) and Tim Burton's black comedy Dark Shadows (2012) with Johnny Depp.

Director Tim Burton told BBC news Lee had "inspired an entire generation of film-makers".

Prime Minister David Cameron described him on Twitter as "a titan of the golden age of cinema and a distinguished WW2 veteran who'll be greatly missed".

Lee was recognised for his achievements with a knighthood in 2009, when he admitted his pleasure in a long career.

A lifelong devotee of heavy metal — a genre partly inspired by the sort of horror films he starred in — Lee made several albums featuring his booming, classically-trained bass voice.

His last album Metal Knight was released on his 92nd birthday, followed by a hard-rocking Christmas carol in 2014.

"What's really important for me is, as an old man, I'm known by my own generation and the next generation know me too," he said.