Obituaries of note

RATU SIR KAMISESE MARA, 83, Fiji's first prime minister and a key U.S. ally in the South Pacific during the Cold War, died Sunday in Suva, the capital. Hospital officials said the cause was complications from a stroke he had in 2001. He was the last of a group of powerful, mostly hereditary Pacific Island chiefs who led their countries to independence from British, Australian, New Zealand and U.S. colonial rule from the mid 1960s.

FRANK MORRISON, 98, a Democratic governor in a predominantly Republican Nebraska during the 1960s, died Monday in McCook, Neb. He served as governor from 1961 to 1967.

HUIB DRION, 87, a former Dutch supreme court justice who was a major force behind the legalization of euthanasia in the Netherlands, died Tuesday, in Leiden. In 2002, the Netherlands became the first country to legalize euthanasia for certain terminally ill patients, but only under strict guidelines.

JULIA COMPTON MOORE, 75, a military wife whose care for the families of soldiers killed in war was portrayed in the Mel Gibson movie We Were Soldiers, died Sunday in Auburn, Ala. Her husband of 55 years, retired Lt. Gen. Harold Moore, was wounded in Korea and Vietnam and wrote the book based on his combat experience, We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young, which Gibson turned into the 2002 movie.

VANN KENNEDY, 98, a journalist and television pioneer who gave longtime CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite his first job, died Sunday in Corpus Christi, Texas. While working at the Austin, Texas, news bureau of the International News Service before World War II, he hired Cronkite, then a University of Texas student, to be a copy boy.

FRED OLIVI, 82, co-pilot of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, died April 8 in Chicago. He was in the crew of a B-29 Bockscar that dropped the second bomb on Aug. 9, 1945, three days after the Enola Gay dropped a bomb on Hiroshima.

CECIL WALDO PARROTT, 83, a survivor of the Bataan Death March in the Philippines who unsuccessfully sought reparations from Japanese corporations Mitsui and Mitsubishi for forced labor as a World War II prisoner, died in Seattle on Thursday. He endured 1,228 days in Japanese captivity.

KARL HASS, 92, a former Nazi officer convicted for the wartime massacre of 335 Italian civilians, died Wednesday in a Rome rest home where he had been serving a life sentence under house arrest. The former SS major was sentenced in 1998 to life in prison for killings at the Ardeatine Caves on the outskirts of Rome when the Italian capital was under German occupation during World War II.

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