MILAN, Italy (AP) – Aldo Notari, president of the International Baseball Federation, died Tuesday evening at a hospital in Parma, where he was being treated for suspected stomach cancer, the Italian Baseball Federation said. He was 74. Notari, the first European to hold the post, headed the IBAF since 1993.

He was president of the federation when the International Olympic Committee voted last year to drop baseball, as well as softball, from the Olympics after the 2008 Beijing Games. Baseball has been an Olympic sport since 1992.

Notari lobbied to get baseball reinstated for the 2012 London Olympics, but the IOC upheld its decision in February.

Notari was instrumental in the creation of the World Baseball Classic, an international tournament that debuted in March.

It featured major league players competing for their national teams.

Notari played for the Parma baseball team during the 1950s and 1960s and became club president and general manager in 1969. He led the club to domestic and European honors – including the Italian championship in 1976, when Parma lost only three games.

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Louise Simone Bennett-Coverly

TORONTO (AP) – Louise Simone Bennett-Coverly, a Jamaican poet and folklorist who popularized her country’s culture before its independence from Britain, died Wednesday, according to the government-run Jamaica Information Service. She was 86.

Born in 1919, Bennett-Coverly was one of her country’s most beloved cultural icons.

She appeared in Kingston theater productions in the 1940s, and in 1948 became the first black person to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.

Known in Jamaica as “Miss Lou,” Bennett-Coverly advocated the teaching of Jamaican culture, and in the mid-1950s joined the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Caribbean Service as a folklorist.

In 1953 she recorded an album, “Jamaican Folksongs,” and in 1966 published a collection of poems called “Jamaica Labrish.”

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Chen Jinlang

SINGAPORE (AP) – Chen Jinlang, a popular Chinese-language pop singer, has died of colon cancer, the Straits Times newspaper reported Wednesday. He was 45.

Chen died Tuesday at a hospital, surrounded by his family, the newspaper said.

Chen was famous for songs in the Hokkien dialect about bad luck or personal difficulties. He was especially popular during the monthlong Hungry Ghost Festival, when Chinese pay tribute to their deceased family members.

Tuesday was the first day of this year’s festival. Chen had hoped to perform at 20 concerts during the month, the Straits Times said.

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John W. Mack

CLEVELAND (AP) – John W. Mack, former principal oboe of the Cleveland Orchestra and teacher to generations of players, died Sunday of complications from brain cancer, his son said. He was 78.

Mack, who lived in Cleveland Heights, served as principal oboe of the Cleveland Orchestra from 1965 until his retirement in 2001.

As a teacher, he mentored oboists who advanced to become principal players with the Boston Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra and Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.

Mack was born in 1927 in Somerville, N.J., took up the oboe in sixth grade and studied at the Juilliard School of Music.

He served as principal in the New Orleans Symphony for 11 seasons and in the National Symphony in Washington, D.C., for two years before joining the Cleveland Orchestra.

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Rupert Pole

LOS ANGELES (AP) – Rupert Pole, husband of Anais Nin and guardian of the diarist’s erotic literary legacy detailing her simultaneous marriages to men on different coasts, died July 15, two weeks after a stroke, his half brother said. He was 87.

After Nin’s death in 1977, Pole oversaw the publication of four uncensored volumes of her journals detailing affairs with such men as novelist Henry Miller, psychoanalyst Otto Rank and her own father, Spanish composer Joaquin Nin.

The diaries, collectively titled “Journal of Love,” included the volumes “Henry and June” (1986) and “Incest” (1992).

Much of the erotic material as well as many of the references to her two husbands were purged from seven previously published volumes, which had established Nin as a feminist hero in the women’s movement.

Weeks after meeting in New York in 1947, Pole and Nin drove to California and eventually married. Pole, an actor who left New York to become a forest ranger, didn’t know that the woman who was 16 years older was already married to banker Hugh “Hugo” Guiler. Guiler and Nin had married in 1923.

Pole studied forestry at the University of California, Los Angeles, then transferred to UC, Berkeley. After graduating, he joined the U.S. Forest Service and was assigned to the San Gabriel Mountains.

Nin lived with Pole in a Sierra Madre cabin.

She juggled her relationships with Pole and Guiler by shuttling between the two coasts every few weeks. She told Guiler she needed to spend time on the West Coast to escape the pressures of New York, while Pole was told she had writing assignments in New York.

Nin married Pole in 1955 in Quartzsite, Ariz., after she “exhausted all the defenses I could invent,” according to a diary passage.

Fearful of the legal consequences of having two husbands who claimed her as a dependent on their tax returns, Nin invalidated her marriage to Pole in 1966 and told him about Guiler.

Nin ultimately chose Pole, spending her final years with him. She died in Los Angeles in 1977 at age 73.

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Sergio Santander

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) – Sergio Santander, the former Chilean Olympic Committee president expelled from the IOC in 1999 for corruption, died of a heart attack on Tuesday, his family said. He was 80.

Santander was one of six members of the IOC expelled for taking thousands of dollars and gifts from officials who bid successfully for the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City.

During the investigation, Santander admitted receiving $4,700 from Salt Lake City bid chief Tom Welch, but said the money was a personal contribution to his race for the Chilean congress representing his native Curico province, 200 miles south of Santiago. He lost the election in 1993.

Expelled with Santander were members from Congo, Ecuador, Mali, Samoa and Sudan. He complained the expelled officials “were those from the smaller countries.” The scandal led to major reforms in bidding.

After a decade as president of the COC, Santander resigned in 1999, shortly before his expulsion from the IOC.

A bookkeeper by profession, Santander as a youth played soccer and boxed. His career as a sports official started in 1965, when he founded the Chilean Car Racing Federation.

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