NEWSMAKERS

NEWSMAKERS

Ex-Secretary of State Eagleburger, 80, dies

WASHINGTON

The only career foreign- service officer to rise to the position of secretary of state, Lawrence Eagleburger was a straightforward diplomat whose exuberant style masked a hard-driving commitment to solving tangled foreign-policy problems.

“As good as they come,” recalled his immediate predecessor as America’s top diplomat.

Eagleburger, who died Saturday at age 80, held the job late in George H.W. Bush’s presidency, culminating a distinguished diplomatic career.

Over 27 years in the foreign service, he served in the Nixon administration as executive assistant to Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, as President Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to Yugoslavia, and as an assistant secretary of state and then undersecretary of state in the first Reagan administration.

In subsequent years, he was available to offer advice, along with other former senior officials, to Hillary Rodham Clinton as she prepared for the job under President Barack Obama.

Eagleburger died in Charlottesville, Va., after a short illness, according to a family friend, Christy Reap. No further details were immediately available.

Patti LaBelle sued over beating at airport

HOUSTON

A West Point cadet and former Army football player is suing veteran R&B diva Patti LaBelle, saying she ordered her bodyguards to beat him up as he waited for a ride home outside a Houston airport terminal.

The lawsuit alleges the cadet, Richard King, was waiting for his brother and father to pick him up outside one of the terminals at Bush Intercontinental Airport on March 11, when three of LaBelle’s bodyguards attacked him. King was in Houston, his hometown, while on spring break from West Point.

“Apparently, defendant LaBelle believed King was standing too close to her (no doubt expensive) luggage, even though he was oblivious to her presence and the danger he was in,” according to King’s lawsuit, which was filed in Houston civil court lastweek and also names the bodyguards, the airport and a taxi dispatcher as co-defendants.