Harold Pinter, the British playwright whose gifts for finding the ominous in the everyday and the noise within silence made him the most influential and imitated dramatist of his generation, died on Wednesday. He was 78 and lived in London.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/26/theater/26pinter.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

We wrote about Pinter here three years ago when he won the Nobel Prize. Here's a central quote from his speech:

The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

He'll be missed.