Deaths (Obituaries)

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      Pete Rose, Baseball Star Who Earned Glory and Shame, Dies at 83

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      One of the sport’s greatest players, he set a record with 4,256 career hits. But his gambling led to a lifetime ban and kept him out of the Hall of Fame.Pete Rose, one of baseball’s greatest players and most confounding characters, who earned glory as the game’s hit king and shame as a gambler and dissembler, died on Monday. He was 83. His death was confirmed by the Cincinnati Reds, the team with which he spent most of his career. No cause was given.For millions of baseball fans, Rose will be known mainly for a number, 4,256, his total of hits, the most for any player in the history of the game. But he was a deeply compromised champion.Rose, of the Cincinnati Reds, on the field before his game against the New York Mets in 1978.Gary Gershoff/Getty ImagesFew sports figures have been the lightning rod for controversy and public opinion that he turned out to be, an athlete who maximized his gifts, earned a legion of fans with his competitive zeal and achieved wide celebrity and acclaim — only to fall from grace with astonishing indignity.Had Shakespeare written about baseball, he might well have seized on the case of Rose, whose ascent to the rarefied heights of sport was accompanied by the undisguised hubris that undermined him.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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      Humberto Ortega, Former Military Chief in Nicaragua, Dies at 77

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      Mr. Ortega, the estranged brother of President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, had been under house arrest for months after making statements that infuriated his sibling.Humberto Ortega Saavedra, the former chief of the armed forces of Nicaragua and younger brother of the current president, who publicly questioned his sibling’s “dictatorial” rule only to wind up under house arrest, died on Monday, the Nicaraguan government announced. He was 77.Mr. Ortega had been in ill health for several months with severe heart problems, the Nicaraguan military said in a statement. He died at a military hospital in the country’s capital, Managua.Mr. Ortega was a key member of the leftist Sandinista Front that in 1979 toppled the right-wing dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza.Along with his brother, Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua’s current president, he was a member of the nine-man directorate that ruled Nicaragua during a civil war against the U.S.-backed rebels known as the contras that lasted throughout the 1980s.In announcing his death, the government acknowledged his “strategic contribution” as a Sandinista, a movement he joined as an adolescent.“He was known as one of the most important military strategists during the insurrection,” said Mateo Jarquín, a Nicaragua historian at Chapman University in California.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 Ashton, ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ Actor, Dies at 76

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      Mr. Ashton was most widely recognized for his role as Sgt. John Taggart in the “Beverly Hills Cop” franchise.John Ashton, the actor best known for his role as the gruff Sgt. John Taggart in the “Beverly Hills Cop” franchise, died on Thursday in Fort Collins, Colo. He was 76.His death was confirmed by his representative, Alan Somers. No cause was given.Mr. Ashton appeared in more than 200 stage, film and television productions in his more than 50-year career. He is most widely recognized for his role as Sergeant Taggart in the “Beverly Hills Cop” movies.Sergeant Taggart is a stuffy rule stickler whose partner is a younger, laid-back detective, Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold). In “Beverly Hills Cop” (1984), they help a fast, young officer from Detroit named Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) track down the person who murdered his best friend, and along the way learn how to bend the rules and why a banana does not belong in the tailpipe of a cruiser.Taggart and Rosewood were originally cast for minor roles in the film, but they became co-stars once Mr. Murphy came on board as Foley, Mr. Ashton said in a 2020 interview with MovieJunk, a podcast and a YouTube channel. The film’s director, Martin Brest, saw the spark the three men shared, he said. “We just started developing a chemistry, and Marty saw it and loved it, and just kept letting us ad-lib and run with scenes,” Mr. Ashton said.Mr. Ashton reprised his role in the 1987 sequel, “Beverly Hills Cop II,” and again in “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F,” which was released this past July, again reuniting him with Mr. Reinhold and Mr. Murphy.“Going back to this one was like a family reunion — we just fell right back into it,” Mr. Ashton said in a July interview with “Nerds of Color,” a website and YouTube channel that examines superheroes, sci-fi, fantasy and video games through a culturally critical eye.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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      Amadou Mahtar M’Bow, 103, Dies; His Tenure Leading UNESCO Was Stormy

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      He was the first Black African to head a major international organization, but complaints about his tenure led the U.S. and Britain to pull out of it.Amadou Mahtar M’Bow, a Senegalese civil servant and politician who became the first Black African to head a major international organization when he was elected director general of UNESCO — but whose contested tenure there led the United States and Britain to pull out — died on Tuesday in Dakar, Senegal. He was 103.His death, at a hospital, was announced on the website of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which was established to promote international cooperation in those domains.Mr. M’Bow, a rare survivor among the continent’s first generation of independence leaders, had served as Senegal’s education and culture minister when he rose to the top post at UNESCO in 1974. Over the next 13 years he turned the agency into a spearhead for grievances in the developing world and the Soviet bloc, mainly over Western cultural dominance, while entrenching himself behind a phalanx of handpicked bureaucrats at UNESCO headquarters in Paris.His resistance to Western influences, as well as accusations of misspending and nepotism, contributed to decisions by President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to pull their countries out of UNESCO in disgust, the U.S. in 1984 and Britain in 1985. Britain rejoined in 1997, the United States in 2003.The withdrawal by the U.S. was particularly disastrous for UNESCO, as American contributions had provided a quarter of its budget. For years afterward, the agency was seen by critics as the poster child for U.N. bloat and politicization.Criticism of Mr. M’Bow centered on his promotion of what came to be known as a “new world information order,” a vague body of recommendations that many in the West regarded as a threat to freedom of the press, while its advocates saw it as an attempt to break the perceived Western monopoly on the reporting and dissemination of news.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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      Michel Siffre, 85, Dies; Descended Into Caves to Study the Human Mind

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      He was a pioneer in chronobiology, the study of how our bodies understand the passage of time.On the morning of Sept. 14, 1962, reporters and onlookers began to gather around a hole in the ground, far up in the Maritime Alps between France and Italy. A few hours later, workers rigged a rope down into the darkness; soon they pulled out a small, sturdily built man named Michel Siffre.He had been inside the cave, 375 feet down, for 63 days, with only a four-volt lamp for illumination. He wore dark goggles to limit the glare of the sun, and he had to be carried to a waiting helicopter.This was no rescue: Mr. Siffre, a geologist, was conducting an experiment on himself, to see what would happen to his sense of time if he cut himself off from the normal day-night flow of life on the surface.It turns out that a lot could happen: Time as he experienced had “telescoped,” he said. His circadian rhythm of wakefulness and sleep stretched from 24 to about 25 hours. And what felt to him like one month was in fact two on the surface.“After one or two days, you don’t remember what you have done a day or two before,” he told Cabinet, an art and culture magazine, in 2008. “The only things that change are when you wake up and when you go to bed. Besides that, it’s entirely black. It’s like one long day.”Mr. Siffre, who died on Aug. 25 in Nice, was a leading figure in the field of chronobiology, the study of how the human body understands time. Previous scientists had speculated that, contrary to the prevailing idea at the time, our internal clocks are independent of the solar cycle, even as we usually adjust to its influence. Through decades of experiments beginning with that 1962 descent, he proved it.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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      Elias Khoury, Master of the Modern Arabic Novel, Dies at 76

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      In his fiction and journalism, he sought to illustrate the story of the contemporary Middle East and his native Lebanon.Elias Khoury, a Lebanese writer whose sweeping, intricately rendered tales of postwar life in the Middle East won him praise as one of the greatest modern Arabic novelists, and whose editorial leadership of some of Lebanon’s leading publications made him an arbiter of his country’s turbulent political culture, died on Sunday in Beirut. He was 76.His daughter, Abla Khoury, confirmed the death, in a hospital, adding that her father had been in declining health for several months.Mr. Khoury’s writing, both fiction and journalism, often focused on the twin events that defined his world: the Lebanese civil war, from 1975 to 1990, and the plight of Palestinians after the founding of Israel, particularly the tens of thousands who fled to Lebanon in 1948 and after the Six-Day War of 1967.As a novelist, Mr. Khoury was often compared with the American writer James A. Michener, who in books like “Hawaii” (1959) and “Texas” (1985) attempted to capture epic swaths of history in an intimate narrative.But if his vision was Michenerian, his prose was Faulknerian, driven by interweaving, stream-of-conscious narratives. He also claimed Vladimir Nabokov and Italo Calvino as influences.Mr. Khoury in 2014. His novels often began with a single, sustained encounter before spinning outward, kaleidoscopically, into the past and across borders.Bilal Hussein/Associated PressWe 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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      Cathy Merrick, Advocate for Indigenous People in Canada, Dies at 63

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      She was on the front lines of dogged fights against injustices, including a recent series of murders of Indigenous women by a white man.Cathy Merrick, a towering figure in the fight for Indigenous rights in Canada and the first woman to be elected grand chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, representing 63 First Nations, died on Sept. 6 in Winnipeg, the provincial capital. She was 63.The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs announced her death in a statement.Ms. Merrick died while doing what she had dedicated her life to: advocating for Indigenous people. She had just attended the trial of a corrections officer who had been charged in the death of an Indigenous inmate. The man had been acquitted, and Ms. Merrick was standing on the courthouse steps expressing her disappointment to the news media when she suddenly collapsed.She was taken to nearby St. Boniface hospital, where she was declared dead. The cause was not immediately known, and an autopsy was to be performed.Ms. Merrick’s death was met with deep grief across Canada. Hundreds attended her wake as she lay in state last week at the Manitoba Legislative Building, only the sixth person and the first woman ever to receive that honor.“Grand Chief Cathy Merrick was a relentless and incredibly effective advocate for First Nations peoples, especially for those most vulnerable,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada said in a statement.Catherine Ann McKay, whose traditional Cree name was Kameekosit Ispokanee Iskwew, was born on May 31, 1961, at Cross Lake, the English name for the Pimicikamak Cree Nation, in northern Manitoba. She was the adopted daughter of Hazel and Thomas Spence. Her mother was a nurse, her father a carpenter.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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      R. Peter Munves, Master Marketer of Classical Music, Dies at 97

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      As an executive at Columbia and RCA Records, he popularized the classics for mass audiences by applying the same techniques used to sell pop music.R. Peter Munves, a record company executive who revolutionized the marketing of classical music, died on Aug. 19 in Glen Cove, N.Y. He was 97.His death, in a nursing home, was confirmed by his son Ben.Mr. Munves carved out a moneymaking niche in what for much of its history has been a low-margin, struggling industry, selling classical music to mass audiences by applying the techniques of pop music marketing.In the 1960s, while at Columbia Records, he created a series called “Classical Greatest Hits” that packaged bits of Brahms, Mozart, Bach and other composers onto single LPs. In 1968 he signed the electronic musician Wendy Carlos to record “Switched-On Bach” — pieces by Bach on the Moog synthesizer.Both ideas were big hits, commercially if not with the critics. Time magazine reported in a 1971 profile of Mr. Munves that the “Greatest Hits” series “scored a solid bull’s-eye in the market and rang up $1,000,000” in revenues. The “Switched-On Bach” album, Time said, was Columbia’s “all-time best classical seller.”In 1968, Mr. Munves signed the electronic musician Wendy Carlos to record an album of Bach compositions on the Moog synthesizer. It was said to be Columbia’s best-selling classical album of all time.Columbia/CBSIn 1981 Mr. Munves produced an album that compiled 222 well-known themes from classical music. One critic called it a “marketing masterpiece.”Columbia/CBSMr. Munves went on to produce an album called “Themefinder” — a compilation of 222 well-known themes from classical music that the New York Times music critic Edward Rothstein called a “marketing masterpiece” upon its release in 1981, adding that Mr. Munves was “an inspired producer.”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