newsmakers

newsmakers

Davy Jones mourned in private funeral

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla.

Monkees singer Davy Jones was remembered in a small, private Florida funeral as a laid-back daydreamer who brought fans into a world blissfully free of worries.

The service was behind locked doors Wednesday at Holy Cross Catholic Church in Indiantown, close to Jones’ home.

The Rev. Frank O’Loughlin, who presided over the service, said several of Jones’ own songs were played, including “I’ll Love You Forever” and “Written in My Heart.” In his own remarks to mourners, the priest compared the singer to the diminutive hero of “Lord of the Rings,” saying the author J.R.R. Tolkien portrayed a world not unlike the one Jones offered fans.

“He wrote about a quiet, gentle, contented people,” Father O’Loughlin said in his sermon, a copy of which he shared with The Associated Press. “A people for whom life was bright, neighbors friends, daydream believers with an absolute absence of burden who took themselves lightly — lighter than air. Wasn’t that what David conveyed to the world — a blissful lightness of being?”

The three surviving members of The Monkees did not attend, saying they didn’t want to attract unwanted attention.

Jones died of a heart attack last week at age 66.

Filmmaker Cameron plans 7-mile ocean dive

LOS ANGELES

James Cameron has gone 21/2 miles underwater to the wreck of the Titanic dozens of times. Now the “Avatar” and “Titanic” filmmaker aims to go nearly three times deeper.

Cameron said Thursday he plans to take a submersible craft down seven miles to the world’s deepest point, in the Mariana Trench of the Pacific Ocean, 200 miles southwest of Guam.

The journey later this month reportedly would be the deepest solo dive ever, breaking Cameron’s own record set this week, when he descended five miles off the coast of Papua, New Guinea, in the South Pacific.

Cameron will be the first person to descend to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, known as the “Challenger Deep,” since a two-man U.S. Navy expedition did it in 1960.

Actor Steven Seagal, sheriff’s office sued

PHOENIX

Actor Steven Seagal and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office are being sued over a 2011 arrest that a Phoenix-area man says was staged for a reality-TV show.

Jesus Llovera says Seagal and deputies unlawfully raided his home because they thought Llovera was raising fighting roosters.

Llovera says the birds on his property were for show and not for fighting.

The civil suit asks for a jury to determine unspecified monetary damages.

Associated Press