"Robert W. Greene, a pioneering investigative reporter and editor who helped Newsday twice win the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and who left an indelible imprint on a newspaper whose reporting mission he deeply believed in, died Thursday after a long illness. He was 78." [Newsday, Romenesko]

The Semicolon died this week at the age of 417 from complications of irrelevancy and misuse. Semicolon was born in England in 1591 to Ben Jonson, the first notable writer to use them "systematically." The mark of punctuation dedicated its career to connecting independent clauses and indicating a closer relationship between the clauses than a period does. But mostly it just confused the shit out of English students everywhere.

Well, you can have his gun now. Oscar winning actor, NRA president, and all around iconic conservative slab of beefcake, Charlton Heston, died last night at his Beverly Hills home. He was 84. "His death was confirmed by a spokesman for the family, Bill Powers, who declined to discuss the cause. In August 2002, Mr. Heston announced that he had been diagnosed with neurological symptoms 'consistent with Alzheimer's disease.'" [NYT] Olds, and The New York Times, will remember him as the star of The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, but for the rest of us, he will always be the man who launched a thousand spoofs. Update: "Heston was born John Charles Carter in Evanston, Illinois, on Oct. 4, 1923, though the year of his birth has been in dispute for years, with some sources saying he was born in 1924." [Bloomberg]

Frosty Freeze, one of the world's most respected B-Boys, died yesterday at the age of 44 [NYT]. He was an early member of the world famous Rock Steady Crew. More importantly for white people, his dancing scenes in 1983's "Flashdance" helped to popularize break dancing to whites across the earth. He also appeared in the seminal hip hop films "Style Wars" and "Wild Style." Below, a clip of the break dancing scene from "Flashdance," and a clip of a b-boy battle from "Style Wars." The man was damn good at what he did, THAT'S FOR SURE.

Jules Dassin, hot film noir director of the 1940s blacklisted by Sen. Joe McCarthy, died in Athens Monday. He was 96. Dassin made his mark with films like "Brute Force" and "Naked City" before the onetime communist decamped for Europe amid McCarthy's witch hunt, hopping from Britain to France to Greece. He was nominated for a 1960 Best Director Oscar for "Never on Sunday" and was awarded a Golden Palm at Cannes in 1978 for "A Dream of Passion." Born to Russian Jewish emigrants, he grew up largely in New York. His son Joe Dassin recorded the French hit song "Les Champs-Élysées," among others, before passing away in 1980. [AFP, Variety]

"Dith Pran, a photojournalist for The New York Times whose gruesome ordeal in the killing fields of Cambodia was re-created in a 1984 movie that gave him an eminence he tenaciously used to press for his people's rights, died in New Brunswick, N.J., on Sunday. He was 65 and lived in Woodbridge, N.J." [NYT] A slideshow of Pran and his work is available here.

Richard Widmark, who played heavies and hustlers in a million incredible old noir movies, died Monday at the unlikely age of 93. To film dorks he'll always be remembered as the insane Tommy Udo, villain in the 1947 classic Kiss of Death. The star-making scene where he gigglingly pushes a wheelchair-bound old lady down a flight of stairs is embedded below.

San Francisco-based advertising guru Hal Riney died this week at the age of 75. He masterminded a ton of corporate ad campaigns, but he'll go down in the history books as the man whose ads helped re-elect Ronald Reagan in 1984 [NYT]. His masterpiece for Reagan was "It's Morning Again In America," a minute-long spot that reassured Americans that everything is okay—with the rich, fatherly voice-over provided by Riney himself. Barack Obama really could have used this guy for the next several months. After the jump, the full version of Riney's "Morning Again" spot. Welfare moms probably didn't appreciate its success.

But not, erm, not the way the Joker died this winter. Industry rumor says that DC Comics will kill off Batman this summer, and not even in his own comic book but in the series Robin. According to the rumor (possibly confirmed by this cover of an upcoming Robin), the sidekick will become the new Batman, which isn't even how that works. Since the new Batman movie The Dark Knight comes out in July, Batman's death in another medium would make front-page news, especially since Captain America's death made the New York Times front page last spring.

Here's a measure of the loss the American reading public has suffered with the abrupt closure of Pagesix.com. The New York Post's round-the-clock gossip site is down, but we still have a copy of what is believed to be the last post ever published on the site. At 1.07pm this afternoon, Jarett Wieselmann (awesome name for a gossip writer, by the way) explained Pete Wentz's affection for Jessica Simpson's shoes, and illustrated the Fall Out Boy bassist's cross-dressing tendencies with this useful exercise in Photoshop. And on that note, Pagesix.com was dead.

The author of 2001: A Space Odyssey passed away in his home in Sri Lanka. While Gawker's sci-fi blog io9 will have a fuller obituary reflecting upon all his work, my favorite Arthur C Clarke book was actually Tales from the White Hart, which included a story about a man, working alone on an island, helping a colony of ants invent fire. In the same book, Clarke invented the idea of noise-canceling headphones, though his fictional version turned into a bomb. Clarke was the last of the golden-era sci-fi greats, and I'll be drinking to him tonight. [Photo: Getty]

Conservative author, essayist, columnist, pundit, smug asshole, gadabout, secret spook, and blue-blooded creep William F. Buckley is dead. Buckley, 82, suffered from diabetes and emphysema, though his cause of death is not yet known. And with him died respectable, intelligent, genteel-but-cut-throat New York Conservatism.

As has been bemoaned by dozens of bloggers eager to write dirty words, many obituaries for the late former Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz politely elided the reason he was forced to quit. Butz said, in public: "I'll tell you what the coloreds want. It's three things: first, a tight pussy; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to shit." (A portion of that quote is also the name of a quite decent late-period Alex Chilton album, whose title was, of course, altered in its American release. Prudes!) Of course, most obits leave out the nastier sides of their subjects, but when a person is famous only for that nasty side, or one specific incident of nastiness, it's shitty, cunty, cocksucking journalism to not mention it.

For full coverage of the actor's life, and death, click here.

Call off the search for Bobby Fischer. The man who totally schooled Commie chess player Boris Spassky in 1972 and later went on to mildly dislike America, the tribe of Moses and pretty much everything else in the world died in Iceland on yesterday. The nature of the illness that killed him is unknown. [BBC]

Christopher Bowman, aka Bowman the Showman, the US male figure skater of the early 90s, has died at age 40. Of course, he'll always live on at this completely amazing fan website (MIDI alert). He died from drugs, obviously. [NYT]

Hillary, the first man to scale Mount Everest along with a sherpa guide whose name people forget, was 88. [Reuters]

Steve Florio, the mustachioed colorful extravagant "pirate captain" ex-CEO and president of Conde Nast, died today from a heart attack. He was 58. Florio's tenure at Conde Nast spanned from the early 80's to 2004, when he stepped down (perhaps under duress!) as chief executive due to "heart problems." Over 25 years, Florio ran the New Yorker for a time and also GQ and saw circ numbers skyrocket (though he has been accused of fuzzy math). He also sometimes did the bidding of James Truman, including overseeing the offloading of Details to Fairchild. After he left he wrote the best memoir that was never written called Managing the Gods. It included a bit about the state of GQ when he arrived there as publisher, "One guy in ad sales was a cocaine freak; another was a notorious sex fanatic. An out-of-town sales rep was a cross-dressing nut - hose, bra, hats and the works."

Borat Sagdiyev, the mild-mannered Kazakhstani journalist known for his investigations of America and a documentary film of the same name, as well as for the great offense that he gave the Jews, has died. Similarly, so has talk show host Ali G, an English journalist best known for his willingness to ask questions that probably should have been asked but everyone felt too stupid to do so.