Srinivas Padma: Personal Musings on Life, Growth, and Connections

Hollywood: Former Playboy model and oil heiress Anna Nicole Smith died Thursday after collapsing at a hotel. She was 39. According to her attorney. Smith, was unresponsive and was rushed to the hospital on Thursday while staying at the Seminole Hard Rock Cafe Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Fla., hotel officials said. Smith was mourning the death of her 20-year-old son who died in her hospital room last year . Anna Nicole Smith, the pneumatic blonde whose life played out as an extraordinary tabloid tale — Playboy centerfold, jeans model, bride of an octogenarian oil tycoon, reality-show subject, tragic mother. She was stricken while staying at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino and was rushed to a hospital. Edwina Johnson, chief investigator for the Broward County Medical Examiner's Office, said the cause of death was under investigation and an autopsy would be done on Friday. Just five months ago, Smith's 20-year-old son, Daniel, died suddenly in the Bahamas in what ...

Barbara McNair, the pioneering black singer-actress who hosted her own TV variety show and starred with Sidney Poitier in the early 1970s, has died. She was 72. McNair died on Sunday in Los Angeles after a battle with throat cancer, her sister, Jacqueline Gaither, said. “She was very family oriented,” Gaither said. “She was more than just a star or a famous personality. She was a person of her own.” Gaining fame in the 1960s as a nightclub singer, McNair graduated to film and television as opportunities were opening up for black women late in the decade. She made her Hollywood acting debut in 1968 in the film, If He Hollers, Let Him Go. She later starred with Elvis Presley in his 1969 film Change of Habit and as Poitier’s wife in the 1970 film They Call Me MISTER Tibbs! She found movie acting “a more rewarding kind of work than singing,” she told the Washington Post in 1969. “When I’m working in a club, I must go from one song to another rapidly and I don’t have much time to express my...