Nguyen Thi Dinh; Vietnamese Vice President

Nguyen Thi Dinh, 72, Vietnamese vice president, a former Communist insurgency leader and one of the country’s few top woman officials. Dinh was a former member of the ruling Communist Party’s Central Committee. She was prominent at the start of the North Vietnamese Communist insurgency against the U.S.-backed government of South Vietnam. News reports of her death referred to her as the outstanding woman in modern Vietnamese history. She had been one of six vice presidents of Vietnam’s ruling Council of States since 1987 after establishing a reputation as the senior woman within the Viet Cong during the war in the 1960s and ‘70s. In Ho Chi Minh City on Wednesday of undisclosed causes.