Also noted: Allister Sparks, South African journalist who challenged apartheid

Allister Sparks, 83, a prominent South African journalist who challenged apartheid and exposed a covert propaganda campaign by his government, leading to the president's downfall, died on Monday in Johannesburg.

He died of heart failure after an infection.

Sparks was the crusading editor of the Rand Daily Mail, the major voice of liberal opposition to the white Pretoria government and a champion of majority rule, when he revealed that apartheid opponent Steve Biko had been beaten to death by the police in 1977.

His paper later exposed a secret offensive by the authorities against the mainstream news media in which a slush fund was used to establish a government-friendly newspaper, the Citizen, to counter the Rand Daily Mail and to buy stakes in other publications. That revelation led to the resignation of President John Vorster in 1979.

In 1981, the Rand Daily Mail fired Sparks as part of an effort, he said, to "lower the paper's voice and to shift the emphasis more toward white readers and less toward black readers."

Sparks went on to become what he described as a war correspondent in South Africa for the Washington Post and the Observer in Britain, covering the violence that erupted between the government and the United Democratic Front, the leading anti-apartheid group.

Sparks befriended Nelson Mandela, who had been the imprisoned leader of the African National Congress. On the basis of an extensive interview, Sparks wrote a 20,000-word article for the New Yorker in 1994, titled "The Secret Revolution," on the historic negotiations that ended white minority rule. After Mandela became president, Sparks served under him as the TV news and current affairs editor of the South African Broadcasting Corp.

John Craighead, 100, a lifelong outdoorsman who along with his twin brother subdued, tagged and tracked the grizzly bears of Yellowstone National Park in a landmark study during the 1960s, revealing as never before the lives of those mighty, mysterious animals, died Sept. 18 at his home in Missoula, Mont.

From the earliest days of their boyhood, Craighead and his twin, Frank Jr., felt a pull toward nature that would tug at them all their lives. It took them from Washington, D.C., where they explored the banks of the Potomac River with their entomologist father, to rugged regions of Wyoming and Montana, where they established themselves as pre-eminent conservationists.

The brothers were credited with helping write the National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968, legislation that protects 208 rivers in 40 states. They were regular contributors to National Geographic magazine, once chronicling their sojourn in India as guests of the brother of a maharajah, who shared their enthusiasm for falconry.

But they were best known for their study of grizzlies begun in 1959 — an initiative that sparked an angry confrontation with Yellowstone officials but that yielded a wealth of information about the park's grizzlies at a time when they came perilously close to extinction.

John Johnson Craighead, along with his brother, Frank, was born in Washington on Aug. 14, 1916. Their sister was Jean Craighead George, the noted author of young adult books including "My Side of the Mountain" and "Julie of the Wolves."