RELINQUISHING. Bill Gates, 50, Microsoft chairman and co-founder; his day-to-day responsibilities running the software giant, as of July 2008; in Redmond, Wash. The move will leave executives Steve Ballmer and Ray Ozzie, whom Gates named to succeed him as chief software architect, to face challenges from competitors like Google that provide user-friendly software over the Internet. Gates, a 2005 TIME Person of the Year, said he plans to focus more on his philanthropic work.
DIED. Neroli Fairhall, 61, champion archer and the first paraplegic athlete to compete in the Olympics; of undisclosed causes; in Christchurch, New Zealand. When rival archers at the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles complained, wondering whether the New Zealand national champion gained an unfair advantage by sitting in her wheelchair, Fairhall deftly silenced them. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never shot standing up.”
DIED. Luis Jimenez, 65, who with his towering fiberglass sculptures of illegal immigrants, fiesta dancers and ruddy cowboys became one of the most important artists to depict Latino culture; after a piece of a 32-ft.-tall sculpture he was crafting for Denver International Airport fell as it was being transported, crushing him; in Hondo, N.M. The Chicano artist celebrated working life in energetic pieces like Man on Fire–based on the Aztec emperor Cuauhtemoc, executed by Spanish colonists for his resistance–which is now in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Art.
DIED. Barbara Epstein, 77, literary lion who as a founder and co-editor of the New York Review of Books worked with–and in many cases, befriended–writers such as Joyce Carol Oates, Desmond Tutu, Václav Havel and Alison Lurie; in New York City. Epstein was a junior editor at Doubleday when she helped produce Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl in 1952. During a 1963 newspaper strike, she helped launch the Review with her then husband Jason Epstein and shared, with Robert Silvers, responsibility of editing it for the next 43 years. Her sharp pencil and abiding friendliness won the admiration of authors as well as readers, and the biweekly became known as a hive of intellectual vigor, ambitious writing and unapologetically liberal views.
DIED. Gyorgy Ligeti, 83, Hungarian avant-garde composer whoin spite of his staunch refusal to seek popular acceptancegained global fame when, unknown to him, Stanley Kubrick used his music in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, giving him a new fan base of trippy, psychedelic teens; in Vienna. As a young composer, he was afraid to write down the modern pieces he heard in his head for fear of government retaliation (“totalitarian regimes do not like dissonances,” he wrote). After escaping communist Hungary, he wrote polyphonous, unpredictably paced concertos, chamber pieces and other works, including one opera, Le Grand Macabre, which opens with the sound of honking cars and is now one of his best-known works.
DIED. James Cameron, 92, only known survivor of a lynching attempt and founder of the America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, a 12,000-sq.-ft. memorial to victims of racial persecution; in Milwaukee. After fleeing a 1930 attempted robbery in Marion, Ind., in which a man was killed, Cameron, 16, landed in jail with two friends, who were publicly lynched on a maple tree near the courthouse. As the noose tightened around his neck, he recalled hearing someone in the crowd shouting that he was innocent–and he was returned to jail for five years. After witnessing the U.S. Senate apologize last June for past failures to ban lynching, Cameron said, “It’s 100-something years late, but I’m glad they are doing it.”
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