Kaku Yamanaka, 113, Japan's oldest person, died Saturday of old age in central Japan. Yamanaka died at a hospital where she was taken early Saturday after falling ill at a nursing home in Yatomi City.
Born on Dec. 11, 1894, Yamanaka became Japan's oldest person when Tsuneyo Toyonaga, 113, died in February.
Yamanaka was known for her love of singing and took part in local karaoke contests, the nursing home official said.
Josef Mikl, 78, whose abstract works went a long way toward rehabilitating Nazi-ravaged Austria's visual art scene, died March 29 of cancer and was buried Thursday, the Austria Press Agency reported. His death was kept confidential until after the burial according to his wishes.
Mikl was considered among the most important Austrian representatives of the "informal" style, with a wide range of expression exhibited in works that spanned more than half a century.
Beyond the artistic value of his creations, his abstract paintings and sculptures helped define Austria's postwar art direction, serving as a symbolic break with the strictures imposed by the Nazis that consigned Picasso, Matisse, Chagall and other modernists to the trash heap.
Mikl, however, always fought attempts to have his works fit a particular label.
Charles G. Smith Jr., 83, an editor at the Clarion-Ledger newspaper in Jackson, Miss., and at the Clinton News, died Wednesday of complications from Alzheimer's disease.
