Beatles recording engineer dies at 72

LONDON» Geoff Emerick, the Beatles studio engineer who entered the music business in his midteens and by his early 20s had helped make history through his work on such landmark albums as “Revolver” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” has died. He was 72.

Abbey Road Studios, home to the Beatles and many other recording artists, confirmed the death Wednesday and vowed to ensure that Emerick’s legacy lives on. Colleague William Zabaleta told Variety that Emerick collapsed and died Tuesday while they were talking on the telephone. He said Emerick had suffered from heart problems.

Paul McCartney, in an online tribute Wednesday, wrote that Emerick “had a sense of humor that fitted well with our attitude to work in the studio and was always open to the many new ideas that we threw at him. He grew to understand what we liked to hear and developed all sorts of techniques to achieve this . ... We spent many exciting hours in the studio and he never failed to come up with the goods.”

Emerick wasn’t widely known to the general public, but he was an invaluable part of the Beatles’ legacy as they became increasingly ambitious and experimental in the studio and helped transform rock music into an art form.

Holocaust survivor who became U.S. Army major general has died.

Sidney Shachnow, who survived the Holocaust as a child and fought in Vietnam as a U.S. Army Green Beret before becoming a major general, has died. He was 83.

Shachnow’s wife, Arlene, said by phone Wednesday that he passed away Sept. 27 at a hospital in Pinehurst, N.C. They lived in the nearby town of Southern Pines.

Shachnow was involved in some of the biggest events of the 20th century, from enduring the horrors of Nazicontrolled Europe to leading U.S. Army troops in Berlin during the fall of the Berlin Wall.

He served in the U.S. Army Special Forces for more than 30 years, a career that was informed by a childhood spent avoiding death.

It came full circle when he lived in a house in Berlin that was once owned by Adolf Hitler’s finance minister.

Nobel Prizewinning physicist Leon Lederman dies at 96.

BOISE, IDAHO»

Leon Lederman, an experimental physicist who won a Nobel Prize in physics for his work on subatomic particles and coined the phrase “God particle,” died Wednesday at 96.

Lederman directed the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago from 1978 to 1989.

He’s described as a giant in his field who also had a passion for sharing science, resulting in his book, “The God Particle.”

The title refers to a subatomic particle called the Higgs boson, long theorized until a powerful European particle collider confirmed its existence.

Lederman died at a nursing home in the Idaho town of Rexburg, said Ellen Carr Lederman, his wife of 37 years.