Obituaries in the news

The Associated Press

IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — Forest Evashevski, the former Michigan football star coached Iowa to two Rose Bowl victories in the 1950s, has died. He was 91.

Evashevski's son, Forest Evashevski Jr., said Saturday that his father died Friday night from cancer at his home in Petoskey, Mich.

Evashevski, the captain of Michigan's 1940 team, was hired at Iowa in 1952, seven years after Iowa's last winning season. He inherited a program that had languished in the bottom of the Big Ten.

But by 1956 the Hawkeyes were in the Rose Bowl, defeating Oregon State 35-19. They went again in the 1958 season, beating California 38-12. Evashevski won 52 games at Iowa, where he coached until 1960. He also led the team to three Big Ten championships.

In 2006, Evashevski told The Associated Press in an interview that he took satisfaction in knowing his work during the 1950s helped createan atmosphere and expectation of success at Iowa.

Evashevski also served 10 years as the school's athletic director. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2000.

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Lee Hu-rak

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Former South Korean spy chief Lee Hu-rak, who brokered the signing of a historic 1972 peace document with North Korea following a secret trip to Pyongyang, died Saturday. He was 85.

Lee, who had been hospitalized since early May, died of old age and a brain tumor, said Park Yu-kyoung, a spokeswoman at Kyung Hee University East-West Neo Medical Center in Seoul.

Lee, a retired army major general, was a close associate of former President Park Chung-hee, who ruled South Korea with an iron fist for 18 years following a coup in 1961.

While serving as Park's top intelligence officer, Lee traveled to Pyongyang in 1972, met then-leader Kim Il Sung — the father of current leader Kim Jong Il — and helped broker a joint statement in which the two Koreas agreed to work toward peacefully reunifying their divided peninsula.

Lee's trip was made at the height of Cold War rivalry between the Koreas, and he reportedly carried cyanide to kill himself in case negotiations failed and he was taken hostage.

The July 4 joint communique was hailed as the first major accord between the Koreas on unification since the Korean War ended with a fragile truce in 1953. However, it was thrown into limbo a year later when Pyongyang cut off ties with Seoul, criticizing it for having agents kidnap a South Korean opposition leader in Japan.

Lee allegedly ordered the abduction of Kim Dae-jung, who eventually won the South Korean presidency in the late 1990s, to help cement Park's rule.

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Qian Xuesen

BEIJING (AP) — Qian Xuesen, a rocket scientist known as the father of China's space technology program, died Saturday in Beijing, the official Xinhua News Agency said. He was 98.

Qian, also known as Tsien Hsue-shen, began his career in the U.S. and was regarded as one of the brightest minds in the new field of aeronautics before returning to China in 1955, driven out of the United States at the height of anticommunist fervor.

Qian set up China's first missile and rocket research institute, which later helped start China's space program.

He led the development of China's first nuclear-armed ballistic missiles and worked on its first satellite, launched in 1970.

He retired in 1991, the year before China's manned space program was launched. But his research formed the basis for the Long March CZ-2F rocket that carried astronaut Yang Liwei into orbit in 2003.

Born in 1911 in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, Qian left for the United States after winning a scholarship to graduate school in 1936. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later at the California Institute of Technology, where he helped start the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

During World War II, Qian helped to design ballistic missiles for the U.S. military. In 1945, as an Army colonel with a security clearance, he was sent to Europe on a mission to examine captured rocket technology from Nazi Germany.

He studied the German V-2 rocket and interviewed its chief designer, Wernher von Braun, who would go on to play a key role in the American manned space program.

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November 01, 2009 04:15 AM EST

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