Deaths (Obituaries)

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    Fred Smith, Billionaire Founder of FedEx, Is Dead at 80

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    His vision for how to ship packages overnight led to not just a new company, but also a new sector of the world economy and a now-familiar English verb.Frederick W. Smith, who bet everything he had on a plan to revolutionize freight transport, courting disaster early on but ultimately winning vindication in the form of power in Washington, billions in personal wealth and changes in how people all over the world send and receive goods, died on Saturday. He was 80.His death was announced by FedEx in a statement that did not provide further details.FedEx was conceived in a paper that Mr. Smith wrote as a Yale University undergraduate in 1965. He argued that an increasingly automated economy would depend on fast and dependable door-to-door shipping of small packages containing computer parts. He got a C.Today, FedEx employs more than half a million people and operates the world’s largest fleet of cargo aircraft. On an average day, the company ships more than 16 million packages in about 220 countries and territories.Like Google, FedEx created a new service that came to be seen as so essential that the corporate name is now a widely recognizable verb.Mr. Smith was celebrated as one of the great business minds and executives of his time.He was well prepared for the industry he helped create. He flew planes as a teenager and then served two tours of duty in Vietnam as a Marine Corps pilot. His father, formerly chairman of the Dixie Greyhound Lines, was known as the Bus King of the South.Aside from seeing the need for national overnight delivery, Mr. Smith’s greatest innovation was a hub-and-spoke system of routes. He based the sorting of packages in Memphis, where he found an unused airplane hangar. He flew his planes at night, when the skies were relatively empty.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Nathan Silver, Who Chronicled a Vanished New York, Dies at 89

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      An architect, he wrote in his book “Lost New York” about the many buildings that were destroyed before passage of the city’s landmarks preservation law.Nathan Silver, an architect whose elegiac 1967 book, “Lost New York,” offered a history lesson about the many buildings that were demolished before the city passed a landmarks preservation law that might have offered protection from the wrecking ball, died on May 19 in London. He was 89.His brother, Robert, who is also an architect, said that he died in a hospital after a fall and subsequent surgery to repair a torn knee ligament.Mr. Silver’s book — an outgrowth of an exhibition that he curated in 1964 while he was teaching at Columbia University’s architecture school — was an indispensable photographic guide to what had vanished over many decades. It was published as the city’s long-percolating preservation movement was working to prevent other worthy structures from being destroyed.“By 1963, it seemed urgent to make some sort of plea for architectural preservation in New York City,” he wrote. “It had been announced that Pennsylvania Station would be razed, a final solution seemed likely for the 39th Street Metropolitan Opera” — it was destroyed in 1967 — “and the commercial buildings of Worth Street were being pounded into landfill for a parking lot.”He added, “While cities must adapt if they are to remain responsive to the needs and wishes of their inhabitants, they need not change in a heedless and suicidal fashion.”He found images in archives of “first-rate architecture” that no longer existed, including a post office near City Hall; Madison Square Garden, at Madison Avenue and 26th Street; the art collector Richard Canfield’s gambling house, on 44th Street near Fifth Avenue; the 47-story Singer Tower, at Broadway and Liberty Street; the Produce Exchange, at Beaver Street and Bowling Green; and the Ziegfeld Theater, at 54th Street and Sixth Avenue.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      David Hekili Kenui Bell, an Actor in ‘Lilo & Stitch,’ Dies at 46

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      Mr. Bell’s first role in a feature film was providing comic relief in the Disney hit.In Disney’s latest live-action remake, “Lilo & Stitch,” David Hekili Kenui Bell has a short but memorable role in which he is so bewildered to see aliens that he lets his shaved ice plop to the ground. The appearance was his first in a feature film.Mr. Bell, who had played minor roles in a few productions, died on Thursday. He was 46.His sister, Jalene Bell, confirmed his death on social media on Sunday and in a family statement that did not provide a cause of death.He was credited simply as Big Hawaiian Dude on his IMDb page, but on TikTok he referred to himself as the Shave Ice Guy.“Lilo & Stitch,” which is based on the 2002 film and the animated franchise, was released on May 23 and became one of the most profitable recent films as it raked in more than $800 million in sales.His role was part of a running gag in the franchise. In those moments, a sunburned character who is relaxing somewhere drops his ice cream when the aliens arrive.In one of two movie scenes where he appeared, the aliens startle him while he sits at the beach in a sleeveless shirt, with a towel on one shoulder and sunglasses atop his head. Predictably, he drops his shaved ice.“These damn aliens owe me a shave ice,” he captioned the scene on TikTok.In the original “Lilo & Stitch,” the man dropping the ice cream is bald and is often not wearing a shirt.Mr. Bell had also appeared in two episodes of a “Magnum P.I.” remake in 2018 and 2019, as well as in one episode of a “Hawaii Five-0” remake in 2014, according to IMDb. He was involved in the upcoming film “The Wrecking Crew,” about two half brothers solving their father’s murder in Hawaii, his page on the site said.He appeared in the “One Life, Right?” commercials for the Kona Brewing Company. The ads won a 2025 Pele Award, according to his sister and the organization’s website. The Pele Awards honor excellence in advertising and design in Hawaii.Outside of acting, Mr. Bell worked at the Kona International Airport near Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, according to the social media statement from his sister.Complete information on survivors was not available.To celebrate her brother’s life and express their grief, Ms. Bell said that she and her grandson went to get shaved ice.“David loved being an actor,” doing voice-overs and traveling as part of his work, his sister said. “The film industry and entertainment was so exciting to him.” More

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      Leonard A. Lauder, Philanthropist and Cosmetics Heir, Dies at 92

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      He was best known for his success in business, notably the international beauty company he built with his mother, Estée Lauder. But he was also an influential art patron.Leonard A. Lauder, the art patron and philanthropist who with his mother, Estée Lauder, built a family cosmetics business into a worldwide juggernaut that supplied generations of women with the creams, colors and scents of eternal youth, died on Saturday at his home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He was 92.The death was announced by the Estée Lauder Companies.While best known for his business enterprises, Mr. Lauder was also one of America’s most influential philanthropists and art patrons. He gave hundreds of millions to museums, medical institutions, and breast cancer and Alzheimer’s research, as well as to other cultural, scientific and social causes. His art collections ranged from postcards to Picassos.In 2013, he pledged the most significant gift in the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a trove of nearly 80 Cubist paintings, drawings and sculptures by Picasso, Braque, Léger and Gris. Scholars put the value of the gift at $1 billion and said its quality rivaled or surpassed that of the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the Pompidou Center in Paris.After the gift was announced, he added another dozen major Cubist works, The New York Times reported in a profile of Mr. Lauder last year.The eldest son of Estée Lauder, who in 1946 founded the company that bears her name, Mr. Lauder was for decades a senior executive and the marketing expert and corporate strategist behind his mother, the flamboyant public face of the Lauder empire, who pitched its lipsticks, bath oils, face powders and anti-wrinkle creams with almost messianic zeal.In a business reliant on imagery and mythmaking, his mother, the daughter of a Queens merchant, had created a genteel Hungarian aristocratic past for herself and a name to go with it. Josephine Esther Lauter, the wife of a luncheonette owner, thus became the glamorous Estée Lauder.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Joel Shapiro, Celebrated Post-Minimalist Sculptor, Dies at 83

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      His stick-figure sculptures conveyed a surprising depth of emotion, hinting at the threat of imbalance. He also produced more than 30 large-scale commissions.Joel Shapiro, a celebrated American sculptor who sought to challenge the constraints of Minimalism in works that imbued life-size stick figures with a surprising depth of feeling, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 83.His daughter, Ivy Shapiro, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was acute myeloid leukemia.Mr. Shapiro’s best-known sculptures are easy to recognize. Constructed from wooden beams jutting in different directions, they typically suggest a human figure with outstretched arms, a blocky head and a torso shaped like a cereal box.Often the figures appear to be walking or paused in midstep; it’s not clear if they are coming toward you or moving away. They look sturdy and almost athletic compared with the gaunt walking men of the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, who was one of Mr. Shapiro’s heroes.A sculpture by Mr. Shapiro was unveiled at the Kennedy Center in Washington in 2019.Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post, via Getty ImagesDespite their narrow formal vocabulary and building-block-like clunkiness, Mr. Shapiro’s sculptures convey an uncanny range of emotion and movement. From one piece to the next, his figures variously leap with apparent joy, dance balletically, fall backward, twist in existential pain, topple onto their heads or collapse onto the floor in a tangle of arms and legs. Their subject, in the end, is balance, or rather imbalance — of both the spatial and mental sort.“Every form is loaded with the psychology of its maker,” Mr. Shapiro said in an interview for this obituary in 2024.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Alex Polikoff, Who Won a Marathon Housing Segregation Case, Dies at 98

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      He notched a victory in a Supreme Court decision against the City of Chicago in 1976. He then spent over 40 years making sure the ruling was enforced.Alex Polikoff, who won a landmark discrimination case before the Supreme Court in 1976 showing that the City of Chicago had segregated Black and white public housing residents, and who then spent decades fighting to make sure that the court’s will was enforced, died on May 27 at his home in Keene, N.H. He was 98.His daughter Eve Kodiak confirmed the death.Mr. Polikoff’s class-action lawsuit, known as Gautreaux after its lead plaintiff, Dorothy Gautreaux, ranks among the most important decisions in the history of civil rights litigation.Ms. Gautreaux, a public-housing resident, and her five co-plaintiffs claimed that the Chicago Housing Authority had systematically funneled Black residents into a small number of poorly constructed high-rise complexes, which became havens of crime and drug use.Such segregation was an open secret in Chicago, and the subject of decades of protest — Mr. Polikoff filed the case in August 1966, just months after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began his own grass-roots campaign to desegregate the city.But Chicago, under Mayor Richard J. Daley, pushed back. Dr. King left the city without success, while Mr. Polikoff spent a decade fighting the city in court. Ms. Gautreaux died in 1968, eight years before the case reached the Supreme Court.By then, the lawsuit had been combined with a similar suit against the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. In oral arguments before the court, Mr. Polikoff squared off against one of his former classmates from the University of Chicago Law School: Robert H. Bork, the solicitor general.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Muere Violeta Chamorro, presidenta de Nicaragua tras la guerra civil

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      En 1990 se convirtió en la primera mujer en dirigir un país centroamericano. Su presidencia llegó después de que la nación se viera sumida en luchas políticas.Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, quien llegó a la presidencia de Nicaragua en 1990 como una figura de unidad tras la guerra civil y fue la primera mujer elegida para gobernar un país centroamericano, murió el sábado por la mañana en su apartamento de San José, Costa Rica. Tenía 95 años.Su muerte fue confirmada por su hijo Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, quien dijo que llevaba muchos años delicada de salud.Violeta Barrios de Chamorro pasó al primer plano de la política nicaragüense tras el asesinato de su marido, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, director de un periódico, una figura crítica con los revolucionarios sandinistas de izquierda y un feroz opositor a un némesis compartido: la dictadura de la familia Somoza, que comenzó durante la presidencia de Anastasio Somoza García en 1936.Barrios de Chamorro fue presidenta en la década de 1990, al final de un periodo en el que el país había sido conmocionado por la guerra. La gestión cotidiana del gobierno la delegó a un yerno y se posicionó como un símbolo de unidad en un país profundamente dividido.Su agenda política generó rechazo tanto de la izquierda como de la derecha. Sin embargo, en los últimos años, las encuestas de opinión pública sugerían que era la figura más admirada de Nicaragua, un símbolo de reconciliación teñido en un aura de profunda fe católica similar a la de una virgen maternal.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      John L. Young, 89, Dies; Pioneered Posting Classified Documents Online

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      His site, Cryptome, was a precursor to WikiLeaks, and in some ways bolder in its no-holds-barred approach to exposing government secrets.John L. Young, who used his experience as a computer-savvy architect to help build Cryptome, a vast library of sensitive documents that both preceded WikiLeaks and in some ways outdid it in its no-holds-barred approach to exposing government secrets, died on March 28 at a rehabilitation facility in Manhattan. He was 89.His death, which was not widely reported at the time, was from complications of large-cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his wife, Deborah Natsios, said.Cryptome, which Mr. Young and Ms. Natsios, the daughter of a C.I.A. officer, founded in 1996, offers up a grab-bag of leaked and obscure public-domain documents, presented in reverse chronological order and in a bare-bones, courier-fonted display, as if they had been written on a typewriter.The 70,000 documents on the site range from the seemingly innocuous — a course catalog from the National Intelligence University — to the clearly top secret: Over the years, Mr. Young exposed the identities of hundreds of intelligence operatives in the United States, Britain and Japan.“I’m a fierce opponent of government secrets of all kinds,” he told The Associated Press in 2013. “The scale is tipped so far the other way that I’m willing to stick my neck out and say there should be none.”Though he received frequent visits from the F.B.I. and his internet service providers occasionally cut off his website for fear of legal entanglements, he was never charged with a crime, and Cryptome was always soon back online.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jane Larkworthy, 62, a Top Magazine Writer and Editor on Beauty, Dies

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      She made her mark in publications like Glamour, W, Jane and Mademoiselle. In 2007, she was on the receiving end of media attention, testifying in a sensational trial.Jane Larkworthy, a veteran beauty writer and top-ranking editor during “The Devil Wears Prada” era of influential print fashion magazines, died on Wednesday at her home in New Marlborough, Mass. She was 62.Her sister, Kate Larkworthy, said the cause was breast cancer.Ms. Larkworthy’s work began appearing in magazines in the mid-1980s; her first job was at Glamour, followed by a stint at Mademoiselle. By 1997, she was the beauty director of Jane, a popular magazine aimed at young women. (It was named after another journalist Jane — Jane Pratt.)Later moving on to W magazine, Ms. Larkworthy became its executive beauty director. She was active online, too, writing for websites like Air Mail and New York magazine’s The Cut, where for a time she was beauty editor at large.Ms. Larkworthy in 2015, when she was executive beauty director of W magazine.Cindy Ord/Getty Images for Saks Fifth AvenueMs. Larkworthy looked the part of an editor at a glossy fashion magazine, the kind satirized in the 2006 movie “The Devil Wears Prada,” with her straight long hair in a refined shade of celebrity-colorist-applied straw and, more often than not, polished outfits that might have well brought Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy to mind.But while her fields of expertise might seem superficial, her views on fillers and face creams were infused with industry knowledge and a large dose of well-grounded skepticism.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More