Catalan avant-garde artist Antoni Tapies, has died aged 88, his art foundation said Tuesday. He began as a surrealist painter then moved towards informal art, incorporating waste paper, rags and other material into his canvases.
Wislawa Szymborska (pictured), a Nobel Prize laureate in poetry, died of lung cancer Wednesday, aged 88. Arguably the most popular poet in Poland, she tackled serious subjects with simplicity and humour.
President Malam Bacai Sanha of the West African state of Guinea-Bissau has died in a French hospital in Paris, officials said on Monday. Sanha was 64 years old.
Reports that Cheetah, the famous chimpanzee sidekick in the "Tarzan" films of the early 1930s died at the age of 80, have been thrown into disrepute. Some animal experts and official records have brought the chimp's identity into question.
World leaders gathered in Prague on Friday for the funeral of former Czech president Vaclav Havel, who died last Sunday at the age of 75. Havel was an architect of the 1989 Velvet Revolution that ended Soviet rule of what was then Czechoslovakia.
British film director Ken Russell (pictured), best known for his productions of The Who's rock opera album Tommy and Lair of the White Worm, died in hospital on Sunday, his family said.
Danielle Mitterrand, the widow of France’s former Socialist President François Mitterrand, died early Tuesday at the age of 87. A former resistance heroine, she used her position as first lady to devote herself to many humanitarian causes.
British singer Amy Winehouse died of alcohol poisoning, a coroner told an inquest into her death on Wednesday. Found at her home in London on July 23, Winehouse died after drinking heavily following a three-week abstention from alcohol.
Honda rider Marco Simoncelli suffered fatal injuries in a crash on turn 11 at the Malaysian Grand Prix on Sunday. Simoncelli won the MotoGP world championship in 2008.
