Obituaries

French international news agency Agence France-presse reports that Arman Soldin, its Ukraine video coordinator, was killed last month during a rocket attack near the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. Soldin, 32, was with a team of AFP journalists traveling with Ukrainian soldiers when the group came under fire with Grad rockets, the agency said. The rest of the AFP team was uninjured.

John “Johnny” Bender, a former editor at The Press-enterprise and other Southern California News Group newspapers, has died at age 64. Bender, a longtime Moreno Valley resident, had retired in May 2019. He was not only an editor and journalist, but also a poet, a bass-playing jazz musician, a motorcyclist, husband, father and friend.

Hodding Carter III, a Mississippi journalist and civil rights activist who as U.S. State Department spokesman informed Americans about the Iran hostage crisis and later won awards for his televised documentaries, has died. He was 88. He died in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he taught leadership and public policy. Before moving to Washington in 1977, Carter was editor and publisher of his family’s newspaper, the Delta Democrat-times, in Greenville, Mississippi.

A Ukrainian journalist working with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica was killed and his Italian colleague was injured when they came under attack as they traveled to the city of Kherson in southern Ukraine, the newspaper reported. Bogdan Bitik, who was working as an interpreter for the Italian journalist, Corrado Zunino, was killed in an attack at the gate to the city, “most likely by Russian snipers,” the paper said. Zunino was injured and was treated at a hospital in Kherson.

James Shearer, who co-founded Spare Change News some 30 years ago, has died at the age of 64. The paper is sold by homeless people on the streets of Boston, and was begun with the idea that it would provide them an alternative to panhandling.

Former Pulitzer Prize Board Co-chair and Administrator Mike Pride died April 24 in Florida from complications of a longstanding blood disorder. He was 76.