MEXICO CITY (AP) – International Olympic Committee member Eduardo Hay, a physician who helped bring the 1968 Summer Games to Mexico, died Wednesday, the IOC and his family said Monday. He was 89.

Hay developed an infection Jan. 3 and died two days later, said his widow, Yolanda.

As a member of the committee seeking the 1968 Olympics, Hay’s discussion of medical issues helped overcome doubts about the wisdom of holding the games at Mexico City’s 7,349-foot altitude.

He served as a member of the IOC from 1974 to 1991 and remained an honorary member until his death. He was a member of the IOC Medical Commission from 1967 to 1993, serving as vice chairman for the final 13 years.

Hay was the son of a Mexican revolutionary general, also named Eduardo Hay, who served as Mexico’s foreign secretary from 1935 to 1940.

He studied medicine in France and returned home to join the Mexican Army. While maintaining a gynecology-obstetrics practice, he also was active as a fencer and was president of the Pan-American Fencing Federation from 1955 to 1957. He was named to the Hall of Fame of Mexico’s national sports federation late last year.

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Robert Heilbroner

NEW YORK (AP) – Robert Heilbroner, an economist and the author of the best-selling book “The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers,” has died. He was 85.

Heilbroner died Jan. 4, according to the Web site of the New School University, where he was a professor emeritus at the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science division and where he spent his career. The cause of death was not given.

“The Worldly Philosophers,” first published in 1953, provides a history of world economists from Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes. A 1999 story in The New York Times called it “a “Profiles in Courage’ of the great thinkers who shaped modern economics.”

Heilbroner graduated from Harvard University in 1940 and briefly worked in the federal Office of Price Administration before serving in the Army during World War II.

He then began studying at the New School while working as a freelance writer and earned a doctorate in economics for his book “The Making of Economic Society” after joining the school’s economics faculty, the Web site said.

Heilbroner wrote more than 20 other books.

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Willo Davis Roberts

GRANITE FALLS, Wash. (AP) – Willo Davis Roberts, a prolific and award-winning mystery writer and children’s author who was one of the first to confront difficult issues for youngsters, died Nov. 19. She was 76.

She died at home after a battle with congestive heart disease, husband David Roberts said.

Willo Davis Roberts, who wrote about 100 books and won three Edgar Awards, a Mark Twain Award and a Washington State Governor’s Writers Award.

She and her husband operated a dairy farm in California and started a family. Working at a hospital, she wrote at night and made her first sale in 1955 with “Murder at Grand Bay” for $150.

Her first 35 books were for adults, but her agent persuaded her to submit “The View From the Cherry Tree” to a children’s publisher and the tale of an 11-year-old boy who witnesses a murder became a hit in 1975.

In 1977, long before child abuse drew widespread attention, Roberts won the Georgia Children’s Book Award for “Don’t Hurt Laurie!” Another book, “Sugar Isn’t Everything,” dealt with diabetes, a disease Roberts had.

She won Edgars in the young adult category for “Twisted Summer” in 1997, “The Absolutely True Story: How I Visited Yellowstone Park With the Terrible Rubes” in 1995 and “Megan’s Island” in 1989.

One of her last works, “Undercurrents,” has been nominated for a 2004-2005 Mark Twain Award. She won the same award from the Missouri Association of School Libraries for “Baby-Sitting is a Dangerous Job” in 1988.

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Charles E. Teel Jr.

JOPLIN, Mo. (AP) – Judge Charles E. Teel Jr., a key figure in the landmark Nancy Cruzan right-to-die case, died Saturday after a long illness. He was 75.

Cruzan, a young Missouri woman, was seriously injured in a 1983 traffic accident that left her in what doctors described as an irreversible persistent vegetative state. Her parents sought to have the feeding tube that kept her alive removed. Teel approved their request in 1988, but the Missouri Supreme Court overturned the ruling four months later.

The Cruzan family appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to take its first right-to-die case and heard arguments in December 1989. The following July, the court ruled 5-4 that in the absence of “clear and convincing” evidence of Nancy Cruzan’s wishes, the feeding tube should remain in place.

But the court also said new evidence regarding a patient’s intent should be considered. The family’s attorney then presented to Teel statements from two of Cruzan’s former co-workers who said they remembered her saying she would never want to live “like a vegetable.”

Based on that evidence, Teel ruled in December 1990 that doctors could remove Cruzan’s feeding tube. Cruzan, then 33, died the day after Christmas.

Teel retired in 1994.

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Michel Thomas

NEW YORK (AP) – Michel Thomas, a linguist who earned the prestigious Silver Star for bravery during World War II, died Saturday. He was 90.

The founder of Michel Thomas Language Centers in New York, Los Angeles and London died of heart failure at his Manhattan home Saturday night, said his publicist, Bruce Bobbins.

Born Moniek Kroskof in Lodz, Poland, on Feb. 3, 1914, to a family of prosperous clothing and textile merchants, he was sent to live with an aunt in Breslau, Germany, to escape anti-Semitism. Members of his family were later killed at Auschwitz.

He moved to France in the 1930s and studied at the University of Bordeaux and the Sorbonne. When Germany invaded France, he joined the French resistance.

A biography by Christopher Robbins says that, as a resistor, Thomas was interrogated in 1943 by Gestapo leader Klaus Barbie at a roundup of mostly German Jews who were being sent to Auschwitz. Thomas was spared by pretending he did not understand German.

In 1987, Thomas testified against Barbie at his trial for crimes against humanity. Barbie was sentenced to life in prison.

Thomas’ medal citation said he fought alongside American troops as an attached member of the Army’s 45th Infantry Division. The Silver Star, the army’s third-highest medal for combat valor, was given for his bravery and for leading patrols in enemy territory.

Thomas moved to the United States in 1947. Fluent in 10 languages, he developed a language-teaching method that attracted people from the entertainment, political, academic and business worlds.

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