Legendary pop singer Whitney Houston was found dead Saturday at a Beverly Hills, California, hotel, officials said. She was 48.

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Legendary former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, who was fired in November after 46 years as head coach in the wake of a child sex abuse scandal involving an assistant, died Sunday at the age of 85.

“He died as he lived,” the family said. “He fought hard until the end, stayed positive, thought only of others and constantly reminded everyone of how blessed his life had been.”

Paterno, the coach with the most wins in major college football history, disclosed he had treatable lung cancer shortly after university trustees ousted him for failing to tell police about a sex abuse allegation years earlier against long time assistant coach Jerry Sandusky.

Read more here (via News24)

Controversial British author and atheist Christopher Hitchens died Thursday at the age of 62.

Hitchens died in Houston of pneumonia, a complication of cancer of the esophagus, Vanity Fair magazine said.

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A week after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, residents of Tripoli ventured out to begin the grim work of burying the dead in mass graves on Saturday, as evidence emerged of widespread summary killings during the battle for the Libyan capital.

The stench of decomposing bodies and burning garbage hung over the city as it faced a potential humanitarian catastrophe due to collapsing water and power supplies, shortages of medicine and no effective government.

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Somali Islamist rebels have beheaded at least 11 civilians in the capital in the past two weeks, a campaign of terror that residents said Friday is designed to show the insurgency can still act in Mogadishu after withdrawing from their bases there earlier this month.

“We wake up with beheaded bodies on the streets every day,” said Abdinur Marwan, who lives in a district of Mogadishu called Hewila. “They call themselves Muslims while doing what Allah banned! Everyone is trying to leave here because people are being killed like goats.”

Read the full story here (via Times Live)

Flooding that caused a dam to overflow in part of southwestern Nigeria and led to houses being submerged has killed 20 people, an emergency management agency spokesman said on Sunday.

“Twenty confirmed dead,” said Yushau Shuaib of the flooding in the city of Ibadan. “A dam overflowed its boundary … It’s a very serious situation.”

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The bodies of up to 150 Libyan civilians were found yesterday near Tripoli after allegedly being massacred by pro-Gaddafi forces.

Journalists said they counted as many as 53 executed bodies in a burnt-out farm warehouse near the Khamis military base where the murders are thought to have taken place last Tuesday and Wednesday.

Read the full story here (via Daily  Mail)

A bomb explosion followed by a suicide attack outside a military academy in Algeria killed at least 18 officers in training Friday, a hospital said.

With at least 20 wounded, the toll was expected to rise, according to the Sidi Ghilas hospital where the victims were taken.

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Typhoon Nanmadol triggered a landslide in northern Philippines on Saturday, killing at least two children, authorities said.

The landslide buried the victims in Pangasinan province, according to the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council.

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Al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, has been killed in Pakistan, delivering another major blow to the terrorist group.

The Libyan national, who was the network’s former operational leader, rose to be the second most important figure in the organisation after the death of Osama bin Laden in May.

Read the full story here (via The Telegraph)

Dozens of decomposing bodies were piled up on Friday in an abandoned hospital in Tripoli, a grim testament to the chaos roiling the capital as Libyan rebels clash with forces still loyal to Muammar Gaddafi.

The four-story hospital was in the Abu Salim neighbourhood, which has seen some of the heaviest fighting this week, although the facility was empty and it could not be determined when the men had been killed.

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Toxicology results released to the family of singer Amy Winehouse this week raised almost as many questions as they answered,
experts said Wednesday, keeping the cause of the “Rehab” singer’s death a mystery.

The Winehouse family issued a statement on Tuesday saying no illegal substances were found in the 27-year-old’s system after her death at her London home on
July 23.

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Friends and family pay tribute in Rolling Stone’s 2001 obituary.

One late Saturday afternoon, just two weeks before her death, twenty-two-year-old Aaliyah walked from a black Mercedes-Benz to a small
helicopter for a short flight from New Jersey to East Hampton, New York.

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The legendary silver tongue was silenced last night when gossip queen, social analyst and all-around over-achiever Gwen Gill died.

After an extended battle with emphysema combined with a more recent stroke, Gill’s health took a turn for the worse, leading to her death at about 9pm yesterday. she was 75.

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It was a rock ’n’ roll shot heard ’round the world: the quasi-accusatory snarl of Elvis Presley growling, “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog.”

For “Hound Dog” alone, Jerry Leiber, who died on Monday at 78, will always be remembered in the annals of rock ’n’ roll as a revolutionary catalyst. Years before the term “generation gap” was coined, “Hound Dog” drew the line between the new and the old.

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John Howard Davies, who as a sweet-faced, trembling-lipped child actor played the title role in the 1948 David Lean film “Oliver Twist” and who went on to become a producer and director of some of British television’s most popular comedies, including “Fawlty Towers,” died on Monday at his home in Blewbury in southern England. He was 72

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Police in Australia have launched an investigation into the cause of a house fire near Brisbane in which 11 people died.

Eight of the victims are thought to be teenagers and children; one was just three years old.

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Tony Bennett will pay tribute to Amy Winehouse at this Sunday’s MTV Video Music Awards.

The performance, which will take place in Los Angeles this weekend, will be preceded by video footage from the pair’s March recording session, while it’s expected Adele and Lady Gaga, who both paid respects to Winehouse following her untimely death, will join Bennett on stage. Both are already scheduled to perform at the VMAs.

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Cross-border attacks on PKK guerrillas in Iraq may trigger civil unrest and ethnic violence in Turkey, warns opposition.

A series of cross-border air strikes by Turkey has killed up to 100 Kurdish guerrillas in northern Iraq, according to the Turkish military leadership, which warned that further raids are likely.

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BEIJING — At least 15 people were killed when a blaze ripped through a dormitory building belonging to a ceramics factory in southern China early Tuesday, the local fire department said.

The fire engulfed a four-storey building of the Shengfeng Ceramics Factory in Foshan city, a manufacturing centre in the southern province of Guangdong, the local government said in a statement on its website.

Read the rest of this article here (via AFP)