Oriana Fallaci, 77; Renowned Journalist Confronted Power. [Los Angeles Times] She cornered ayatollahs and challenged dictators. She was glamorous, fearless and always provocative.

Oriana Fallaci, Italian author and globe-trotting journalist whose interviews produced piercing portraits of world leaders for decades, but who in later years channeled her energies into bitter diatribes against Islam, died Friday, her publisher said.

Fallaci was 77 and had been suffering from cancer. She died at a private hospital in Florence, where she had arrived about 10 days ago from New York, aware that her health was failing, the publishing arm of RCS MediaGroup said in a statement.

"She wanted to die in [her native] Florence, and that is what happened," Riccardo Nencini, head of the Tuscan regional government, told reporters.

Raised in a family of rebels and anti-Fascist resistance fighters, Fallaci went on to become one of the most renowned journalists of her generation, conducting remarkable interviews with the world's most powerful people, from Deng Xiaoping to Henry Kissinger, the Ayatollah Khomeini to Golda Meir.

One secret to her success was her ability to disarm her subjects with blunt candor and exotic good looks that masked, though not always, what she described as deep rage at the arrogance of power. And she was never afraid to take a position, nor to offend.

Her life was one of celebrity, self-involved theatrics and high drama. She got shot during student protests in Mexico, covered the Vietnam War — managing even there to maintain her mascara and eyeliner thick and dark — and insulted Federico Fellini. She shed her chador in front of Khomeini, bickered with Yasser Arafat and got Kissinger to admit the futility of Vietnam.

In the last few years, as she battled cancer, she had been living mainly in New York, in what she called a self-imposed exile from "an Italy more ill than I am," and making only rare public appearances.

Accolades poured in Friday for the combative writer, some with caveats because of the vitriolic and often bigoted nature of her final essays on what she called the Muslim invasion of Europe and Islamic assault on Western values.

Even so, she won praise in some quarters for daring to articulate the visceral fears of Europeans and Americans confronted and confounded by Muslim immigrants who refuse to assimilate, and those who advocate violence.

• Expert on Human Hormones Debunked Male/Female Myths. [Miami Herald] Estelle R. Ramey, the Georgetown University endocrinologist who never hesitated to craft a funny and pointed line to overturn assumptions about the physiological differences and similarities between women and men, died Sept. 8 at her home in Bethesda, Md. Ramey burst into the headlines in 1970 when she challenged the assertion of a DNC official that women were unfit for the presidency or for handling emergencies such as the Cuban missile crisis because of their ``raging storms of monthly hormonal imbalances.'' As an expert in the field, ''I was startled to learn that ovarian hormones are toxic to brain cells,'' she wrote. She pointed out that President Kennedy had Addison's disease, a chronic, severe hormonal imbalance, and that his medications could result in dramatic mood swings. ''If it's testosterone the public wants in a president, as an endocrinologist I can't recommend a 70-year-old man in the White House. They should get a 16-year-old boy instead,'' she said. ``It seems the only thing the public doesn't want to see in a president is estrogen.'' Men, she said, are clearly the weaker sex, and Mother Nature may well be a radical feminist, based on the biological evidence. The female of every species, she noted, is stronger in terms of stamina, longevity and performance under stress. ''Men were designed for short, nasty, brutal lives. Women are designed for long, miserable ones,'' she opined.

• Who Will Defend Iran's Women? [Human Events] Iran’s most famous human rights defender was ordered this month to close her Center for Defense of Human Rights or face arrest. This direct threat to Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, sent a clarion call to the world community that it must make clear that Iran’s deteriorating human rights record, especially its treatment of women, is intolerable. Ebadi provided free legal representation to journalists, students and dissidents who faced prosecution for peaceful assembly. She also represented women and men who had been detained and beaten while demonstrating for their basic rights on International Women’s Day. If Ebadi’s law firm is closed, representation for those women who are struggling to put women’s basic freedoms on the Iranian agenda is threatened. It comes as little surprise that women who are treated as second-class citizens in Iran still struggle for basic human rights protections under Iranian law. Since the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, Islamic clerics have imposed strict interpretations of shari’a law and segregated women in most aspects of public life.