Elsewhere
Mitchell Burns,75, a former Ku Klux Klansman who turned FBI informant and helped convict two Klansmen in a 1963 church bombing that killed four black girls, died of an apparent heart attack Tuesday.
Mr. Burns secretly recorded dozens of conversations with bombing suspect Thomas Blanton Jr. in the mid-1960s. He testified last year at Mr. Blanton's trial and earlier this year at the trial of Bobby Frank Cherry. The two men were convicted of murder and are serving life sentences for their part in one of the most notorious crimes of the civil rights era.
Mr. Burns was a member of the Klan in Birmingham in the early 1960s. He turned informant after an FBI agent showed him morgue photos of the girls killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.
Philip Socci, 49, co-creator of a notorious National Lampoon satire involving U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's Chappaquiddick car crash, died Tuesday of complications from spinal surgery.
Mr. Socci, along with future Saturday Night Live writer Anne Beatts, created a Volkswagen ad parody that produced a huge stir when it ran in the early 1970s. The copy in the satire read:
"If Ted Kennedy drove a Volkswagen, he'd be president today. It floats!"
The words appeared with a photo of a Volkswagen floating in a murky lake.
The ad referred to the 1969 death of a Kennedy aide who drowned when the senator drove off a bridge on Massachusetts' Chappaquiddick Island.
Esther Somerfeld-Ziskind,101, a psychiatrist and neurological researcher who helped introduce lithium and group therapy to Southern California, died Nov. 13.
Dr. Somerfeld-Ziskind experimented with the newest techniques for treating mental illness, including insulin and electric shock therapy, and emerging drug treatments such as lithium. She wrote numerous scientific articles and collaborated on research with her husband. He died in 1993.
In 1937, Dr. Somerfeld-Ziskind and her husband, Dr. Eugene Ziskind, launched lecture-discussion groups at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. The sessions were the first therapy groups in Los Angeles, according to the Southern California Psychiatric Society.
They also founded a free psychiatric clinic that evolved into the current Didi Hirsch Community Mental Health Center. Dr. Somerfeld-Ziskind went on to head the psychiatry department at the hospital and later joined the medical school faculty at the University of Southern California.