AP Features, September 22nd, 2007
Alice Ghostley
LOS ANGELES (AP) _ Alice Ghostley, the Tony Award-winning actress best known on television for playing Esmeralda on "Bewitched" and Bernice on "Designing Women," has died. She was 81.
Ghostley died Friday at her home in Studio City after a long battle with colon cancer and a series of strokes, longtime friend Jim Pinkston said.
Ghostley made her Broadway debut in "Leonard Sillman's New Faces of 1952." She received critical acclaim for singing "The Boston Beguine," which became her signature song.
In the 1960s, Ghostley received a Tony nomination for various characterizations in the Broadway comedy "The Beauty Part" and eventually won for best featured actress in "The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window."
From 1969 to 1972, she played the good witch and ditzy housekeeper Esmeralda on TV's "Bewitched." She played Bernice Clifton on "Designing Women" from 1987 to 1993, for which she earned an Emmy nomination in 1992.
Ghostley's film credits include "To Kill a Mockingbird," "The Graduate," "Gator" and "Grease."
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Lord Gilmour
LONDON (AP) _ Lord Gilmour, a Conservative lawmaker who was a thorn in the side of Margaret Thatcher when she served as Britain's prime minister, has died. He was 81.
Gilmour died Friday in West Middlesex Hospital, west of London after a short illness, according to son David Gilmour. No other details were provided.
While holding the Cabinet-level post of deputy foreign secretary, Gilmour was fired by Thatcher in 1981 after he warned her hard-line tactics would lose voters' support.
He then declared Thatcher was steering "full speed ahead for the rocks" and for his next 11 years in the House of Commons he relentlessly attacked Thatcher's dismantling of the welfare state.
A graduate of Eton and Oxford's Balliol College, before his election to Parliament in 1967, he was editor and proprietor of The Spectator magazine from 1954 to 1959.
After serving in three junior ministerial positions, Gilmour was named Defense Secretary shortly before former Prime Minister Edward Heath's government fell in 1974.
After Thatcher's election in 1979, he returned to government as deputy foreign secretary. He played a major role in ending the illegal independence of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
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Rex Humbard
ATLANTIS, Fla. (AP) _ The Rev. Rex Humbard, a former itinerant preacher whose televangelism ministry once reached more parts of the globe than any other religious program, has died. He was 88.
Humbard died Friday of natural causes at a South Florida hospital near his Lantana home, family spokeswoman Kathy Scott said.
The son of evangelists, Humbard evolved his ministry from revivals across the country to a permanent home in Akron, Ohio, and television. He realized the potential of the new medium in the early 1950s and became known to millions by the 1970s.
His Sunday services were televised by 1953. He began with a renovated theater and eventually built the $4 million domed, 5,000-seat nondenominational Cathedral of Tomorrow.
The broadcast, also called "Cathedral of Tomorrow," developed into a mixture of preaching and music. By 1979, the show was broadcast in the United States, Canada, Europe, the Middle East, Far East, Australia and Latin America, giving it a worldwide reach greater than any of his competitors, according to the 1999 reference work "Religious Leaders of America."
His ministry suffered from internal disputes and extensive borrowing. In the 1970s, federal and state regulators complained that notes that he had issued to followers over the years violated securities laws.
Humbard eventually left in 1982 and the congregation dwindled. He became pastor emeritus of the church in 1983 and moved his family ministry to Boca Raton. He gave up his weekend on-air preaching in the 1990s.
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Coral Eugene Watts
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (AP) _ Coral Eugene Watts, a confessed serial killer who once told police that he had murdered more than 80 people, has died. He was 53.
His death Friday came a little more than a week after receiving his second life prison sentence in Michigan, authorities said.
Watts, who said he targeted women with evil eyes, died in a secure area of Foote Hospital in Jackson, said Russ Marlan, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of Corrections.
Watts, who had been an inmate at the Ionia Maximum Correctional Facility, had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and was in the hospital all but one day since Aug. 28, Marlan said. The Jackson County medical examiner's office said it considered Watts' death to be of natural causes and no autopsy would be performed.
Corey Mitchell, a true-crime author whose book, "Evil Eyes," focused on Watts, called him "the country's most brutal serial killer." He said his research indicates that Watts may have killed more than 100 people and that Watts' criminal exploits surpassed those of other, more notorious serial killers such as John Wayne Gacy Jr., Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer.
