Anne Armstrong, GOP stalwart

Anne Armstrong, a powerful Republican in the 1970s and ’80s who advocated a greater role for women and served as U.S. ambassador to Britain in the Ford administration, died Wednesday. She was 80.

Armstrong had battled cancer, her assistant Kay Hicks said.

She was a national leader of the Republican Party and a Cabinet-level adviser to Presidents Nixon and Ford.

Armstrong’s name was again in the news in 2006 when Vice President Cheney accidentally shot and wounded a fellow hunter during an outing at the Armstrong family’s ranch.

Julius Richmond, surgeon general

Dr. Julius Richmond, the U.S. surgeon general in the Carter administration who issued a massive report labeling cigarette smoking “slow-motion suicide,” has died. He was 91.

Richmond, who also was the first director of the federal Head Start program, died Sunday at his Boston-area home, said Alyssa Kneller, a spokeswoman for Harvard University, where Richmond was a professor emeritus.

In 1979, Richmond formally presented his Surgeon’s General’s Report on smoking, a follow-up to the historic 1964 report by an earlier surgeon general that led to warnings on cigarette packs.

The 1,200-page report provided greater detail, saying that smoking causes a variety of diseases and smoking by pregnant women harms their fetuses.

“Today there can be no doubt that smoking is truly slow-motion suicide,” it said. It added that about a third of adults smoked, down from 1964, but there had been a sharp increase in smoking by teenage girls.

Associated Press