In his lengthy partnership with composer Mike Stoller, lyricist Jerry Leiber helped invent the burgeoning rock 'n' roll sound, penning the bluesy hits "Kansas City" and "Hound Dog." The duo went on to write exuberant smashes like "Jailhouse Rock," "Yakety Yak" and "Love Potion #9," among others, amassing a catalog of hits that's still one of the recording industry's most successful. Yet Leiber's sound was far from brash. You can hear his style all over the achingly lovely "Stand By Me," which he and Stoller co-wrote with Ben E. King; in the melancholy and determined collaboration "On Broadway"; and in the great Peggy Lee anthem to disillusionment, "Is That All There Is?" He and Stoller were also prolific producers, the masterminds behind the sweeping sounds of hits as diverse as the Drifters' "There Goes My Baby" and Stealers Wheel's "Stuck in the Middle With You."

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The singer's father, mother and brother and close friends, along with band members and celebrities -- including producer Mark Ronson and media personality Kelly Osbourne, her hair piled beehive-high in an echo of the singer's trademark style -- were among several hundred mourners attending the service at Edgwarebury Cemetery in north London.

Photographers and a few fans lined the lane outside.

The Jewish service was led by a rabbi and included prayers in English and Hebrew and reminiscences from Winehouse's father, Mitch Winehouse. The cab driver and jazz singer, who helped foster his daughter's love of music, ended his eulogy with the words "Goodnight, my angel, sleep tight. Mummy and Daddy love you ever so much."

It ended with a rendition of Carole King's "So Far Away," one of Winehouse's favorite songs.

"Mitch was funny, he told some great stories from childhood about how headstrong she was, and clearly the family and friends recognized the stories and laughed along," said family spokesman Chris Goodman.

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Great niece Robin Randall said Schwartz died at 4 a.m. Tuesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he was being treated for an intestinal infection and underwent several surgeries. His wife, Mildred, and children had been at his side.

Sherwood Schwartz and his brother, Al, started as a writing team in TV's famed 1950s "golden age," said Douglas Schwartz, the late Al Schwartz's son.

"They helped shape television in its early days," Douglas Schwartz said. "Sherwood is an American classic, creating 'Brady Bunch' and 'Gilligan's Island,' iconic shows that are still popular today. He continued to produce all the way up into his 90s."

Sherwood Schwartz was working on a big-screen version of "Gilligan's Island," his nephew said. Douglas Schwartz, who created the hit series "Baywatch," called his uncle a longtime mentor and caring "second father" who helped guide him successfully through show business.

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Marty Allen says Ford, whose battles with cancer and substance abuse inspired millions to seek treatment, died Friday. Allen did not say how Betty Ford died. He says he expects the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library to release additional information.

Her husband, Gerald, died in December 2006.

The couple married in 1948, the same year he was elected to Congress. She was thrust into the spotlight in 1974 when he became president after the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

She was diagnosed with breast cancer weeks later and won acclaim for her openness and courage.

Ford lost to Jimmy Carter in the 1976. Mrs. Ford later was treated for drug and alcohol addiction and then helped found the Betty Ford Center to help others.

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Gagosian Gallery spokeswoman Virginia Coleman said Twombly, who had cancer for a number of years, died Tuesday. Eric Mezil, director of the Lambert Collection in Avignon, France, where a Twombly show opened in June, said he died in Rome.

Twombly is known for his abstract works combining painting and drawing techniques, repetitive lines and the use of graffiti, letters and words.

In 2010, he painted a ceiling of the Louvre museum, the first artist given the honor since Georges Braque in the 1950s.

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He talked about how much he missed his friend and collaborator, indie-film pioneer John Cassavetes, who had recently died. But when I asked Falk whether he'd rather be remembered for his performances in Cassavetes' "Husbands" or "A Woman Under the Influence" than as the professionally befuddled Lt. Columbo of TV fame, he gave me a tolerant smile. I've long since lost any transcript of this interview, but as I recall it now, he said that Columbo had been very good to him, and he was very grateful. If the public wanted him to play that guy for the rest of his life, he was fine with it.

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Falk died Thursday in his Beverly Hills home, according to a statement released Friday by family friend Larry Larson.

In a court document filed in December 2008, Falk's daughter Catherine Falk said he was suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

"Columbo" began its history in 1971 as part of the NBC Sunday Mystery Movie series, appearing every third week. The show became by far the most popular of the three mysteries, the others being "McCloud" and "McMillan and Wife."

Falk was reportedly paid $250,000 a movie and could have made much more if he had accepted an offer to convert "Columbo" into a weekly series. He declined, reasoning that carrying a weekly detective series would be too great a burden.

Columbo -- he never had a first name -- presented a contrast to other TV detectives. "He looks like a flood victim," Falk once said. "You feel sorry for him. He appears to be seeing nothing, but he's seeing everything. Underneath his dishevelment, a good mind is at work."

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"Libya?" he texted me on March 29, knowing that our relationship of 26 years, which began in high school, didn't require a preamble to explain what he meant. "If you can make it to Cairo, have extra flak vest. Thinking this weekend, seriously."

It had been 10 years since I covered a war -- in Sierra Leone, where Chris and I worked and lived side by side for many stressful weeks. He'd invited me a half dozen times to accompany him on assignment to Iraq and Afghanistan, but for various reasons I never went. It's hard to say why Libya was different, but it was. There was never a question of not going.

We had no illusions about how dangerous and deadly Libya is. Only weeks before, two of Chris's close friends and colleagues had been kidnapped by Gadhafi forces in separate incidents and he helped see them safely back to the United States once their releases had been negotiated. The day we arrived in Benghazi, four other journalists were nabbed by government forces and are still in custody. Even in the safest place we could find -- the hotel rooms we shared in Benghazi -- unexplained explosions and random bursts of gunfire on the streets reminded us that danger was literally around every corner.

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I had worked in sales many times by then but nothing of this sort -- half the boutique's handbags, made of the skins of species that seemed like they ought to be endangered, cost well over my highest annual income at that point. I was the typical Rodeo Drive shopgirl, overdressed in the required all black, sulking, daydreaming, always lingering at the window with a dust rag, counting all the passersby luckier than I, waiting for the sun to go down when I could lock up and forget all the non-events of the day. During the rare occasion when a customer came in (I was the sole shopgirl at a store that averaged three to six people per day), I'd quickly tell them to come back next week when we'd have a sale -- which we never had -- because I was too anxious to ring up something in the five figures.

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His long list of great, good, and otherwise notable films focuses mainly on personal morality within the context of social institutions: police departments, courts, media empires, the American economy and government: "Dog Day Afternoon." "Serpico." "Network." "Prince of the City." "The Pawnbroker." "Twelve Angry Men." "Running on Empty." "The Group." "The Verdict." "The Fugitive Kind." "Fail Safe." He was interested in the here and now -- in how his fellow adults lived, loved and died, in boardrooms and courtrooms, in bedrooms, and on the streets. Escapism is one of the great, primal lures of moviegoing, but cinema also exists to confront and engage. That was Lumet's preference, and he continued to indulge it long after Hollywood had retooled itself as a fun factory for teenagers; his gritty, detail-obsessed legal series "100 Centre Street" premiered on cable when he was 75, and his last movie, the coal-black, greed-infected domestic drama "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead," came out in 2007, when he was 82. He never made a film about superheroes, extraterrestrials, or giant robots. He kept it real.

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A friend of mine in his 60s once told me the story of accidentally running into Elizabeth Taylor with her entourage in an alley in New York. He was a successful model and Princeton architect -- no stranger among beautiful people. But the sight of Elizabeth, even in the mid-'70s (when the wattage of her once perfect beauty was already slightly dimmed), was, the way he described it, something like being shot with a gun in the chest by Beauty itself. It wasn't just her fearful symmetry, or her big-bang eyes, but the power of her being, the animation of her character. For him it was life-altering -- in a lifetime of looking at art, that split-second encounter in a New York alley was still the encounter with beauty that left him most dumbstruck, some 30 years later. What he felt for Elizabeth Taylor instantly was something akin to the seismic power of pure love.

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According to official reports, Knut's death was witnessed by hundreds of zoo-goers, one of whom took a video of the bear shaking uncontrollably before falling over from his rock into the surrounding water. The video is now trending on sites like Buzzfeed and Reddit, though if you want to see it you'll have to do your own Google search.

By 11:10 a.m., the video and accompanying article had been wiped from Jezebel's site, and no explanation was given for its removal. It simply disappeared. There was speculation that the post's deletion was due to the angry responses the article provoked in the comment section. Valerie Marino, editor of the site Triangle Music, took a screenshot of Jezebel's front page before the item was removed:

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Such was the stunning beauty of Jane Russell, and the marketing skills of the man who discovered her, the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes.

Russell, surrounded by family members, died Monday at her home in the central coast city of Santa Maria. Her death from respiratory failure came 70 years after Hughes had put her on the path to stardom with his controversial Western "The Outlaw." She was 89.

Although she had all but abandoned Hollywood after the 1960s for a quieter life, her daughter-in-law Etta Waterfield said Russell remained active until just a few weeks ago when her health began to fail. Until then, she was active with her church, charities that were close to her heart and as a member of a singing group that made occasional appearances around Santa Maria.

"She always said 'I'm going to die in the saddle, I'm not going to sit at home and become an old woman,'" Waterfield told The Associated Press on Monday. "And that's exactly what she did, she died in the saddle."

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Longtime friend and journalist Andrew Richardson said Monday that Postlethwaite died in a hospital Sunday.

A gritty and powerful actor, Postlethwaite was nominated for an Oscar for his role in the 1993 film "In The Name Of The Father."

He had recently been seen in the critically acclaimed film "Inception" and had worked with Spielberg on "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" and "Amistad."

Postlethwaite initially planned to become a priest but was drawn to acting.

He received an OBE in 2004 along with many other honors for his long career in movies, theater, and television.

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No matter that Marie, 54, was white. The R&B legend revered and fully immersed herself in black culture -- and in turn was respected and adored by black audiences, not only for her immense soulful talents, but for her inner soul as well.

"Overall my race hasn't been a problem. I'm a Black artist with White skin. At the end of the day you have to sing what's in your own soul," she told Essence.com in an interview last year while promoting "Congo Square." That album would turn out to be her last.

The self-proclaimed "Ivory Queen of Soul," whose many classic hits included "Lovergirl," Square Biz" and the scorching duet "Fire and Desire" with mentor Rick James, was found dead in her Pasadena home on Sunday at the age of 54. Authorities said her death appeared to be of natural causes.

In an interview with The Associated Press last year, Teena Marie said she had successfully battled an addiction to prescription drugs; she had been performing over the last year.

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Morris Jeppson was a weapons test officer aboard the Enola Gay and helped arm the atomic bomb that was dropped over Hiroshima. Tsutomu Yamaguchi was the only person recognized as a survivor of that bombing and the bombing of Nagasaki that came three days after.

They are among the notables who died in 2010.

Plane crashes took the lives of some of the political figures the world said goodbye to this year. Lech Kaczynski, an anti-communist activist who became Polish president, and Anna Walentynowicz, a union activist whose dismissal from a shipyard touched off strikes that led to the eventual toppling of Polish communism, were killed with other officials in a plane crash in Russia. Longtime Republican Sen. Ted Stevens died in an Alaska plane crash.

The political world also lost Robert C. Byrd, Viktor Chernomyrdin, Richard Holbrooke, John Murtha, Francesco Cossiga, Menachem Porush, Nestor Kirchner, Charlie Wilson, Sheik Saqr bin Mohammed Al Qasimi, Alexander Haig, Elizabeth Edwards, Anatoly Dobrynin, Dov Shilansky, Dan Rostenkowski and Juan Mari Bras.

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In his tiny hometown of Van Meter, Iowa, he was the farm boy who never forgot his roots.

Flags flew at half-staff Thursday at the Bob Feller Museum in Van Meter, a short drive west of Des Moines, a day after Feller succumbed to acute leukemia at the age of 92.

Museum general manager Scott Havick says Feller was a patriotic, loyal and warmhearted man who wasn't afraid to speak his mind, and museum staffer Delores Jones says Feller always seemed like family, warmly greeting visitors and sharing stories of his time in the big leagues.

Feller won 266 games with the Indians and was enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962.

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I knew what she was going to say.

There've been two Chicagoans whom I've pre-mourned in my life. That is, the two of them were getting on in years and it was only a matter of time before some news announcer would say, Sad news from Chicago. They both meant so much to me; in fact either could have been the father I wished I had. Both of them would have been heaven. One was Studs Terkel. The other died Thursday.

Before the two died, I'd think ahead to how I'd feel when I'd hear the news. Once or twice I'd even find myself with wet eyes. I knew them both -- not well, but strangely enough, intimately. In the case of Studs, his whole life had been laid bare in the books he'd written, my favorite of which was "Talking To Myself." In the case of Ronald Edward Santo, I'd spent a month with him in the summer of 2000, eating with him, watching him rage, witnessing him charm men and women alike, recoiling in horror as he'd bark at innocent passersby merely because he was teed off about something stupid his beloved Cubs had done. And in the 40 years he'd been associated with that silly baseball team, he'd been made mad by their stupidity more times than the world's combined computer capacity can calculate.

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Kershner died Saturday in Los Angeles after a long illness, said Adriana Santini, a France-based actress who is a family friend. He is survived by two sons, she said. His agent, Derek Maki, also confirmed the death Monday in an e-mail to The Associated Press.

Kershner already had made a number of well-received movies when he was hired by George Lucas to direct "Empire," which was the second produced but fifth in the "Star Wars" chronology.

The 1980 production was a darker story than the original. In it, hero Luke Skywalker loses a hand and learns that villain Darth Vader is his father. The movie initially got mixed reviews but has gone on to become one of the most critically praised.

Kershner told Vanity Fair in October that he tried to give the sequel more depth than the original.

"When I finally accepted the assignment, I knew that it was going to be a dark film, with more depth to the characters than in the first film," he said. "It took a few years for the critics to catch up with the film and to see it as a fairy tale rather than a comic book."

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