PASSINGS

Cleric led fight against abortion

Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, 72, a Colombian prelate who helped lead the Vatican’s campaign against abortion and insisted that condoms do not prevent HIV transmission, died Saturday night at the Pius XI private clinic in Rome, Msgr. Jorge Raigosa, an aide, said.

Lopez Trujillo died of cardiac arrest after medical complications that had put him in intensive care over several weeks, Raigosa said.

In March 2007, Lopez Trujillo traveled to Mexico to launch the Roman Catholic Church’s aggressive campaign against plans in the predominantly Catholic country to legalize abortion. Catholic teaching forbids abortion as a grave sin.

The next month, the Mexico City assembly passed a measure legalizing abortion in the capital for women in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Opponents appealed the law, and Mexico’s Supreme Court is reviewing it.

Lopez Trujillo also made headlines in 2003 for contending that condoms may help spread HIV by creating a false sense of security.

The World Health Organization, among others, called the cardinal’s message “totally wrong” and said condoms were 90% effective when used correctly.

Born in 1935 in Villahermosa, Colombia, Lopez Trujillo moved with his family when he was a young boy to the capital, Bogota. While a university student, he decided to attend a seminary and later received a philosophy degree from Rome’s prestigious Angelicum university.

Geoff Polites

CEO managed sale of Jaguar

Geoff Polites, 60, Jaguar and Land Rover’s chief executive who is credited with steering the storied British luxury brands through the ongoing sale process to India’s Tata Motors Ltd., died Sunday in his home country of Australia after battling serious illness for the last two years, Ford Motor Co. said. Additional details, including where in Australia he died, weren’t released.

Dearborn, Mich.-based Ford credits Polites with leading the team that returned the overall Jaguar and Land Rover business to profitability. Ford said Sunday it still anticipated completing the deal with Tata in the second quarter.

“Geoff ensured that Jaguar Land Rover was not distracted and continued to focus on the fundamentals of the business during the recent sale process, despite at the time also fighting his own personal health battle,” Ford President and CEO Alan Mulally said in a statement.

Polites, who had a nearly 40-year career in the automotive industry, took over as CEO of Jaguar Land Rover in 2005. Before taking the job, he was vice president for marketing, sales and service for Ford of Europe.

Polites was born in Melbourne. He joined Ford Australia in 1970 as a product planner and completed training in the United States and Europe before rejoining Ford Australia in 1975 as marketing and research manager.

Academic studied geography in art

Denis Cosgrove, 59, a cultural geographer who held the Alexander von Humboldt Chair of Geography at UCLA and encouraged the study of his discipline within the humanities, died March 21 of stomach cancer at his home in Los Angeles, UCLA announced on its website.

Cosgrove studied the connection between art and its representation of geography. Landscape and how it is viewed through the lens of art history, architecture and design formed the basis of much of his writing. His 2001 book “Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination” collected images and maps from classical antiquity through the 21st century and reflected on the continuing need humans have to represent the world they live in.

Born in Liverpool, England, on May 3, 1948, Cosgrove earned a bachelor’s degree in geography at St. Catherine’s College at Oxford in 1969. He received his master’s degree in geography at the University of Toronto in 1971 before returning to Oxford for his doctorate in 1977. He taught at Royal Holloway, University of London, before arriving at UCLA in 2000.

From Times Staff and Wire Reports