PASSINGS

Jett Travolta

Son of actor and actress

Jett Travolta, 16, the son of actor John Travolta and his wife, actress Kelly Preston, died in the Bahamas after falling ill and hitting his head at his family’s vacation home, police said Friday.

A house caretaker found the younger Travolta unconscious in a bathroom late Friday morning. He was taken by ambulance to a hospital in Freeport, where he was pronounced dead, according to a statement by Basil Rahming, the chief police superintendent.

The teenager had last been seen going into the bathroom Thursday and had a history of seizures, according to the statement. Police said an autopsy is planned to determine the cause of death.

Another police spokeswoman, Loretta Mackey, said Jett apparently hit his head on the bathtub.

A spokeswoman for Rand Memorial Hospital in Freeport said she could not release any information because of privacy concerns.

Jett was the oldest child of Travolta and Preston, who also have an 8-year-old daughter.

Jack D. Kuehler

Vice chairman of IBM in the 1980s

Jack D. Kuehler, 76, who served as IBM’s vice chairman during the 1980s when the company dominated the global high-tech industry, died Dec. 27 in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., as a result of complications from Parkinson’s disease, said his daughter Christi Kuehler Chappell.

Kuehler’s achievements include guiding IBM into the open-standards PC workstation business, which resulted in a computing platform that is still the foundation of the company’s designs today.

He also was key in forging IBM’s alliances with Intel and Hitachi, as well as the creation of Sematech, an industry-government alliance founded in 1987 to help save the U.S. semiconductor industry.

Kuehler later teamed IBM with Apple and Motorola, a partnership that resulted in the PowerPC microprocessor that became the basis for Apple’s computers from 1994 to 2006.

“He was the best of class of a generation of computer engineers in the mainframe era,” Andrew Grove, former chief executive and chairman of Intel, told the New York Times.

Born in Grand Island, Neb., Kuehler graduated from Santa Clara University with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering.

He started his lifelong career at IBM as an associate engineer at the San Jose Research Laboratory in 1958.

Paul Hofmann

N.Y. Times writer was a foe of Nazis

Paul Hofmann, 96, an Austrian who informed on his Nazi commanders in occupied Rome and later became a New York Times correspondent and author, died Tuesday in Rome, said his son, Alexander Hofmann-Lord.

An ardent opponent of Nazism, Hofmann fled Vienna for Rome after German troops occupied his homeland.

Hofmann eventually was drafted into the German Army and posted to Rome, where he worked as the personal interpreter for two successive Nazi commanders, Gen. Rainer Stahel and Gen. Kurt Maelzer, the New York Times reported.

After befriending members of Rome’s anti-Fascist Resistance, Hofmann passed information gleaned from his work to the underground, including intelligence on the deportation of Jews from Rome and the killing of 335 Italians at the Ardeatine Caves on the outskirts of Rome, the Times reported. That March 24, 1944, massacre was in retaliation for an attack by Italian resistance fighters that killed 33 members of a Nazi military police unit.

Hofmann eventually deserted, hiding his family in a convent and later a safe apartment, the Times reported.

In November 1944, he was tried in absentia by a German military court in occupied northern Italy and sentenced to death for desertion and treason.

After the war, Hofmann became a news assistant in the Times’ Rome bureau. He remained with the paper for nearly half a century, covering Africa, the Middle East, Brazil and the United Nations, as well as Italy and the Vatican.

-- times wire reports