Future Timeline

Lawrence Brooks, the United States’ oldest living World War II veteran, died Wednesday morning, according to his daughter and caregiver, Vanessa Brooks. ... The supercentenarian’s health was winding down, Vanessa Brooks confirmed to Military Times, and he was in and out of the local veterans’ hospital several times in recent months ― but he was still alert, enjoying the holidays and watching his beloved Saints play until the end.

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For his 112th birthday in September 2021, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the celebration was brought to his house in the form of a drive-by party. ... Brooks had danced on his porch, serenaded by the museum’s singing trio, the Victory Belles, while a military flyover banked down his Central City New Orleans shotgun house.

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Brooks had recently requested a new U.S. Army uniform to replace the original he’d lost sixteen years ago in Hurricane Katrina. ... He was presented with an authentic reproduction World War II uniform and his old unit’s badge during a recent short stay in the New Orleans VA hospital at the beginning of November.

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His daughter recently gave several interviews lamenting how Black World War II veterans, including her father, were denied GI Bill benefits. She says he often spoke of how much he wanted to go to school after the war.

“My father earned the Good Conduct Medal, Meritorious Service Medal, and Presidential Unit Medal, then he was left behind,” said Vanessa Brooks. “He served the same five years. He was bombed and strafed in the South Pacific but was not offered a low-interest bank loan, a reduced down payment for a house, or an education.”

She says she plans to bury her father wearing his new uniform, as he requested.

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Multiple sources connected to the iconic comedian and actor -- most famous for his starring role as Danny Tanner in 'Full House' -- tell us he passed away Sunday at the Ritz-Carlton in Orlando.

The Sheriff's Department and the fire department responded to the hotel around 4 PM ET ... after hotel security had found Bob in his room. We're told he was pronounced dead on the scene, but the circumstances of his death are still unclear.

TACOMA, Wash. (AP) — Don Wilson, co-founder and rhythm guitarist of the instrumental guitar band The Ventures, has died.

He was 88.

Wilson died Saturday in Tacoma of natural causes, surrounded by his four children, The News Tribune reported.

The band’s hits included “Walk, Don’t Run,” and the theme song for “Hawaii Five-O.” They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008.

(AP via NPR) HANOI, Vietnam — Thich Nhat Hanh, the revered Zen Buddhist monk who helped pioneer the concept of mindfulness in the West and socially engaged Buddhism in the East, has died. He was 95.

A post on the monk's verified Twitter page attributed to The International Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism said that Nhat Hanh, known as Thay to his followers, died at Tu Hieu Temple in Hue, Vietnam.

(Vox) Thich Nhat Hanh has done more than perhaps any Buddhist alive today to articulate and disseminate the core Buddhist teachings of mindfulness, kindness, and compassion to a broad global audience. The Vietnamese monk, who has written more than 100 books, is second only to the Dalai Lama in fame and influence.

Nhat Hanh made his name doing human rights and reconciliation work during the Vietnam War, which led Martin Luther King Jr. to nominate him for a Nobel Prize.

He’s considered the father of “engaged Buddhism,” a movement linking mindfulness practice with social action. He’s also built a network of monasteries and retreat centers in six countries around the world, including the United States.

In 2014, Nhat Hanh, who is now 93 years old, had a stroke at Plum Village, the monastery and retreat center in southwest France he founded in 1982 that was also his home base. Though he was unable to speak after the stroke, he continued to lead the community, using his left arm and facial expressions to communicate.

In October 2018, Nhat Hanh stunned his disciples by informing them that he would like to return home to Vietnam to pass his final days at the Tu Hieu root temple in Hue, where he became a monk in 1942 at age 16. (The New York Times reports that nine US senators visited him there in April.)

The actor who voiced the cartoon version of Charlie Brown in the 1960s has died, his family announced Tuesday. Peter Robbins was 65, and his family said the cause of death was suicide. Robbins began his work as Charlie Brown as a child in 1963, and he would go on to get a tattoo of the character as well one as of Snoopy as tributes to the comic strip characters created by Charles Schulz.

(ABC) NEW YORK -- Todd Gitlin, a prominent anti-war and campus activist of the 1960s who drew upon his experiences and influenced many others as an author, sociologist and educator, has died at age 79.

His sister Judy Gitlin confirmed his death Saturday, but declined to offer details beyond saying he was hospitalized at the end of last year. Gitlin's friend and fellow author Peter Dreier posted a tribute on his Facebook page, calling him a “prolific writer, a profound thinker, a progressive political activist, and a respected and revered mentor to several generations of activists, writers, and scholars.”

A Manhattan native, Gitlin was a onetime president of one of the leading campus organizations of the ‘60s — Students for a Democratic Society — and helped organize one of the first major protests against the Vietnam War, in Washington, D.C. in 1965. The same year he helped lead an anti-apartheid sit-in at the Wall Street headquarters of Chase Manhattan Bank, a lender to South Africa’s racist regime.

“This is what moved me most about the SDS circle: everything these people did was charged with intensity,” Gitlin wrote in “The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage,” a widely praised book published in 1987 that combined history and personal memories. “They were at once analytically keen and politically committed, but also, with a thousand gestures of affection, these unabashed moralists cared about one another.”

Gitlin's activism dated back to the start of the decade, when he was an undergraduate student at Harvard University. He became a leader of a Harvard group opposing nuclear weapons and helped organize a demonstration in Washington in 1962. He later received a master's degree in political science from the University of Michigan, where Tom Hayden and others helped found the SDS, and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.