Steve Shickles

AP - Florence Wald, a former Yale nursing dean whose interest in compassionate care led her to launch the first U.S. hospice program, has died. She was 91.

AP - Reg Varney, a comic actor who played a cheery Cockney bus driver in British sitcom “On the Buses,” died Sunday, his daughter said. He was 92.

AP - Art dealer Jan Krugier, an Auschwitz survivor who collected the works of Picasso and other renowned artists to help himself move past the horrors of the Nazi era, has died. He was 80.

AP - Clive Barnes, longtime theater and dance critic for the New York Post, has died.

AP - Irving Brecher, who wrote vaudeville one-liners for Milton Berle and scripted Marx Brothers movies, the TV and radio hit “The Life of Riley” and the Oscar-nominated musical “Meet Me in St. Louis,” has died. He was 94.

AP - Matthew J. Cianciulli

AP - Literary and cultural critic John Leonard, an early champion of Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and many other authors, and so consumed and informed by books that Kurt Vonnegut once praised him as “the smartest man who ever lived,” has died at age 69, his stepdaughter said Thursday.

Reuters - Former world 400 meters record-holder and twice Olympic medalist Larry James has died of cancer, USA Track & Field said on Friday.

AP - Mieczyslaw Rakowski, Poland’s last communist-era party chairman and prime minister, has died, Polish media and officials said Saturday. He was 81.

AP - She died just how she wanted to — singing on stage for a good cause. And her recorded songs wafted out of taxis and radios, as fellow Africans struggled with their grief at her passing.