LIU XIAOBO DIES IN CHINESE HOSPITAL: A deserving Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Chinese human rights prisoner Liu Xiaobo died Thursday at age 61 following a high-profile battle with liver cancer that made his death as controversial as his life.

Liu, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who spent his last eight years as a prisoner of conscience, passed away at a hospital in Shenyang, China, where he had been moved from his prison cell in the final stage of his illness.

I wrote a column about him in 2010.

Liu long ago joined the distinguished line of brave men and women trapped in police states who choose, in the name of liberty, to confront their nations’ authoritarian ideologies and instruments of terror. Many of these heroes die unheralded in a jail or an alley or a ditch. The tyrants erase their memory and hide their sacrifice.

He was a courageous man. His memory will be preserved.