THE former pop star Tommy Page, who has died aged 46, was known for his song I'll Be Your Everything, which was written with Jordan Knight and Danny Wood of the boy band New Kids on the Block and went to number one in the US.

Page was also a record company executive and had a senior role at Warner Bros Records, where he helped shape the careers of Michael Buble, Alanis Morissette, Josh Groban and Green Day. He was also senior vice-president of Cumulus Media and had worked for internet radio company Pandora.

Page, a graduate of New York University's Stern School of Business, started his music career as an artist at Sire Records and topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart with I'll Be Your Everything in April 1990. He co-wrote the song with Knight and Wood while touring with them.

Denise Warner from Billboard.com said Page was found dead in New York of an apparent suicide. Page started at the magazine in 2011.

He is survived by his husband, Charlie, and their three children.

THE Serbian film director Lazar Stojanovic, who has died aged 73, was known for his anti-war activism and was jailed under communism during the 1990s. His liberal democratic ideas were popular in communist-run Yugoslavia and after the country broke up in a nationalist euphoria that triggered a series of ethnic wars.

His film Plastic Jesus was banned in the 1970s because of its criticism of totalitarian regimes. Stojanovic was sentenced to three years in prison, while the film was released in the 1990s.

He joined Serbia's anti-war movement against strongman Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s. He helped set up the liberal Vreme (Time) weekly, which was an important independent media outlet during the crisis years.

Stojanovic also made documentaries about Bosnian Serb wartime leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, who were tried for genocide by a UN court for atrocities against non-Serbs during Bosnia's 1992-95 war.

"People who fight for human rights are not politicians. They don't want people to love them," Stojanovic said of his activism in an interview last year. "You dig out things people want to hide and they will hate you for it. They will call you a traitor, but that is something one must endure."

FORMER Haitian president Rene Preval, who has died aged 74, was the only democratically elected president of Haiti to win and complete two terms.

He was elected by a landslide in 1995 as the chosen successor of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. But his second term, which started in 2006, was marred by the disastrous earthquake of January 12 2010, which reportedly killed more than 310,000 people and displaced more than one million. Many Haitians accused him of a fumbling response to the tragedy.

Preval was born on in the rural Haitian town of Marmelade in 1943. His father, Claude, was an agronomist who served under President Paul Magloire and fled during the early years of the dictatorship of Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier.

Preval earned an agronomy degree from Gembloux Agricultural University in Belgium and later studied geothermal sciences at the University of Pisa in Italy, returning to Haiti two years after a popular uprising ousted Duvalier's son, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier.

After the 2010 earthquake there was widespread public anger at Preval, who made few public appearances after the disaster and was blamed for much of the chaos engulfing the capital.

After leaving politics he lived quietly at his estate in the mountains above Port-au-Prince and in the Miami area, where many Haitian expatriates live.

DOCTOR Thomas Starzl, who has died aged 90, was the pioneer of liver transplantation and research on anti-rejection drugs.

Starzl performed the world's first liver transplant in 1963, the world's first successful operation of its kind in 1967, and pioneered kidney transplantation from cadavers. He later perfected the process by using identical twins and, eventually, other blood relatives as donors.

His family said in a statement that he had brought life and hope to countless patients.

"He was a pioneer, a legend, a great human, and a great humanitarian," it said. "He was a force of nature that swept all those around him into his orbit, challenging those that surrounded him to strive to match his superhuman feats of focus, will and compassion."