Rob Holland, 50, a well-known aerobatic pilot, died Thursday when his custom-built carbon fiber plane crashed at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Va., where he had been preparing to fly in an air show this weekend, according to a statement on his Facebook page.
The Federal Aviation Administration said that the plane, an MXS model built by MX Aircraft, crashed while trying to land at Langley around 11:50 a.m. The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board were investigating the cause of the accident.
A professional air show and aerobatic pilot for more than 20 years, Holland was a 13-time U.S. national aerobatic champion, a six-time world four-minute freestyle champion and the 2015 World Air Games freestyle gold medalist, according to his website.
Steve McMichael, 67, a bruising defensive tackle who helped lead the 1985 Chicago Bears to the Super Bowl, taking down opposing quarterbacks with a hard-charging style that he later showcased in the ring with World Championship Wrestling, died Wednesday at a hospice in Joliet, Ill. McMichael announced in 2021 that he had been diagnosed with the neurological disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
McMichael played all but two of his 15 NFL seasons in Chicago, helping to anchor the defensive line on gritty 1980s teams that won six division titles and restored the Bears to greatness. He was slightly undersized at 6 feet 2 and 270 pounds, although he made up for it in speed and toughness, exploding off the line of scrimmage to swat down a pass, break up a play in the backfield or bury a quarterback in the turf.
McMichael was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in February 2024 and appeared on the video board, along with family members and former teammates gathered around his hospital bed, during the official enshrinement ceremony in Canton, Ohio, in August.
Zurab Tsereteli, 91, a prominent Georgian-Russian sculptor known for colossal, often controversial, monuments, died early on Tuesday. His assistant Sergei Shagulashvili told Russia’s state news agency Tass that Tsereteli suffered cardiac arrest.
Tsereteli’s distinctive style prompted much criticism over the years, both in Russia and abroad. Critics argued his pieces were too colossal and didn’t fit in the city’s architecture. One of his most controversial monuments was in 1997 when a 322-foot-tall Peter the Great standing on a disproportionately small ship was erected a block away from the Kremlin, prompting protests from Muscovites.
Pope Francis, 88, who rose from modest means in Argentina to become the first Jesuit and Latin American pontiff, who clashed bitterly with traditionalists in his push for a more inclusive Roman Catholic Church, and who spoke out tirelessly for migrants, the marginalized and the health of the planet, died Monday at the Vatican’s Casa Santa Marta.
The pope’s death was announced by the Vatican in a statement on X, a day after Francis appeared in his wheelchair to bless the faithful in St. Peter’s Square on Easter Sunday.
Throughout his 12-year papacy, Francis was a change agent. He steadily steered the church in another direction, restocking its leadership with a diverse array of bishops who shared his pastoral, welcoming approach as he sought to open up the church. Many rank-and-file Catholics approved, believing that the church had become inward-looking and distant from ordinary people.
Francis reached out to migrants, the poor and the destitute, to victims of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy members, and to alienated gay Catholics. He traveled to often-forgotten and far-flung countries and sought to improve relations with an antagonistic Chinese government, Muslim clerics and leaders from across the fragmented Christian world.
His insistence on shaking up the status quo earned him no shortage of enemies. He demoted conservatives in Vatican offices, restricted the use of the old Latin Mass dear to traditionalists, opened influential meetings of bishops to laypeople, including women, allowed priests to bless same-sex couples and made clear that transgender people could be godparents and that their children could be baptized.
Herbert J. Gans, 97, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who became a groundbreaking sociologist in the United States, exploring the inner workings of the news media and unpacking myths and misconceptions surrounding poverty, class, urban renewal and suburban malaise, died Monday at his home in Manhattan. He had Parkinson’s disease, said his son, David H. Gans.
A longtime professor at Columbia University and former president of the American Sociological Association, Gans was by turns an Ivy League academic, an advocate for liberal causes and a sought-after social critic, contributing essays to publications including The Washington Post and The New York Times. He aimed, he said, to connect his research with the lives of ordinary people, and to work toward answering a fundamental question: “What is a good society, and how can sociology help bring it about?”
Joel Krosnick, 84, a cellist who became one of the foremost chamber musicians in the United States during 42 years with the Juilliard String Quartet, an ensemble celebrated for its performances of contemporary as well as canonical repertoire, died April 15 at his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. The cause was pancreatic cancer diagnosed less than a month earlier, said his wife, Dinah Straight Krosnick.
“Gravity and resilience are virtually built into the cello,” music critic Paul Griffiths wrote in The New York Times in 2003, “but when Joel Krosnick plays, he adds a robust and deliberate intensity of phrasing that is his alone.”
Karen Durbin, 80, a fierce feminist who championed sexual liberation and fulfillment as a journalist, served as the second female editor-in-chief of The Village Voice and then went on to become a virtuoso film critic for The New York Times and other publications, died April 15 in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her death, in a health care facility, was caused by complications of dementia.
Appointed in 1994 as the Voice’s editor-in-chief — only the second woman to hold that job in the paper’s history and the first in nearly two decades — Durbin waged a fervent campaign to attract young readers. Part of that effort involved tilting toward often incendiary coverage of feminism, gay rights and avant-garde culture, and away from muckraking about corrupt and incompetent landlords, judges and politicians.
During much of the Voice’s existence, outsiders judged it by conventional journalistic standards of objectivity — and it often fell short. But Durbin likened the paper’s vibe to that of “a funky bar” in Greenwich Village and defended its liberal bias. “Advocacy journalism is not biased,” she was quoted as saying in “The Freaks Came Out to Write” (2024). “It’s the most honest kind of journalism, because you know where the writer is coming from.”
After leaving the Voice, Durbin covered movies and the arts for the Times, Mirabella, Mademoiselle and Elle, until about a decade ago.
Leonard Zeskind, 75, a dogged tracker of right-wing hate groups, who foresaw before almost anyone else that anti-immigrant ideologies would move to the mainstream of American politics, died April 15 at his home in Kansas City, Mo. The cause was complications of pancreatic cancer.
Long before Donald Trump’s nativist rhetoric in 2023 accusing immigrants of “poisoning the blood” of the United States, Zeskind, a single-minded researcher, spent decades studying white nationalism, documenting how its leading voices had shifted their vitriol from Black Americans to nonwhite immigrants.
His 2009 book, “Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement From the Margins to the Mainstream,” resulted from years of following contemporary Klansmen, neo-Nazis, militia members and other right-wing groups. His investigations earned him a MacArthur “genius grant” in 1998.
Andrea Nevins, 63, a documentary filmmaker who brought sensitivity and depth to seemingly lighthearted stories about underdogs and unlikely heroes, including punk-rock dads and Barbie dolls, died April 12 at her home in Los Angeles. The cause was breast cancer.
Nevins received an Academy Award nomination in 1998 for her first independent project as a producer, the short film “Still Kicking: The Fabulous Palm Springs Follies,” about a cabaret group made up of retirees in the Southern California desert city. The film bears all the hallmarks of her later work: offbeat characters in unconventional circumstances who, through their struggles, say something meaningful about life and how to live it.