Roy G. Saltman, the federal government’s leading expert on computerized voting whose overlooked warning about the vulnerability of punch-card ballots presaged the hanging chad fiasco in Florida and the disputed recount in the 2000 presidential election, died on April 21 in Rockville, MD. He was 90. In a 132-page federal report published in 1988 and distributed to thousands of local voting officials across the country, Mr. Saltman, an analyst working for the National Institute of [...]

Menahem Pressler, the celebrated pianist who fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and who, after establishing himself in postwar America, co-founded the Beaux Arts Trio, died May 6 in London. He was 99. The Beaux Arts Trio became the world’s reigning piano-violin-cello ensemble and dazzled audiences for a half-century. The group recorded nearly all the piano trio repertory — Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Schubert, Brahms, Dvorak, Saint-Saëns and others — through the boom years of LPs and [...]

Sam Zell, the real estate tycoon who specialized in distressed assets and acquired The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and other storied but troubled newspapers in a leveraged buyout of the parent Tribune Company in 2007, died on May 18. He was 81. The son of Polish Jews who fled to America in 1939 as WWII engulfed Europe, Mr. Zell, an abrasive and eccentric Chicagoan, The New York Times said, reveled in testing the [...]