Journalist Michael Hastings killed in car accident

Award-winning US journalist Michael Hastings, whose unflinching reporting ended the career of top US Army general Stanley McChrystal, has died in a car accident in Los Angeles.

Hastings, who was 33, most recently wrote about politics for the news website BuzzFeed.

Editor-in-chief Ben Smith said: "Michael was a fearless journalist with an incredible instinct for the story, and a gift for finding ways to make his readers care about anything he covered, from wars to politicians." Hastings won a 2010 George Polk Award for his Rolling Stone story "The Runaway General".

It was credited with ending McChrystal's career after it revealed the military's candid criticisms of the Obama administration. Hastings quoted McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan at the time, and his aides mocking Obama's officials, including Vice-President Joe Biden, over their war policies.

When he died, Hastings was a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where managing editor Will Dana was quoted on Tuesday as saying Hastings exuded "a certain kind of electricity" that exists in great reporters whose stories burn to be told. "I'm sad that I'll never get to publish all the great stories that he was going to write," Dana said.

Hastings also wrote books about wars, including last year's The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan, and the 2010 publication I Lost My Love in Baghdad, in which he described being a war correspondent whose girlfriend died in Iraq.