MILESTONES

RECOVERING. EMERSON FITTIPALDI, 49, two-time Indy 500 winner, after surgery to correct a broken bone in his neck suffered when he crashed into a wall at the Marlboro 500 in Michigan. Doctors say he can resume racing, but Fittipaldi thinks otherwise: "I had a message from the Lord...It looks like I'm not going to race again."

DEFECTED. RAED AHMED, 29, Iraqi Olympic weight lifter who carried his nation's flag into the opening ceremony. Ahmed exclaimed, "I'm escaping from the hell of Iraq."

ACQUITTED. HERBY BRANSCUM JR. and ROBERT M. HILL, owners of Perry County Bank, of four felony counts, including conspiracy to hide from the irs cash withdrawals by the 1990 Clinton gubernatorial campaign; in Little Rock, Arkansas. The decision appears to clear Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey, an unindicted co-conspirator in the case. Any prosecution of Lindsey for perjury, which Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr has been said to want, is now highly unlikely.

SENTENCED. AWILDA LOPEZ, 29, to 15 years to life in prison for the murder of her six-year-old daughter, ELISA IZQUIERDO. Elisa's death, after years of sexual and physical abuse, attracted attention to the failings of the child-welfare system.

DIED. GENERAL MOHAMMED FARRAH AIDID, 62, Somali faction leader; of a heart attack, a week after suffering wounds in a battle against rival warlords in Mogadishu. In 1993 a U.S.-led U.N. peacekeeping mission was marred when an effort to contain Aidid led to the death of 18 American soldiers in a battle with local militiamen.

DIED. HAROLD C. FOX, 86, Big Band musician and Chicago clothing retailer who was largely responsible for the creation of the wide-shouldered, high-waisted zoot suit, a symbol of the boogie-woogie era; of cancer; in Siesta Key, Florida.

DIED. CLAUDETTE COLBERT, 92, effervescent star of an earlier Hollywood; at her home in Barbados. In films that included such classic comedies as It Happened One Night (for which she won an Oscar) and The Palm Beach Story, as well as a pre-Liz Taylor Cleopatra, she played women who, through charm and technique, had to persuade society that they were something other, better, more glamorous than they really were. In doing so, she became the epitome of couture elegance and city-girl pluck. The Colbert heroine walked the earth in sensible shoes and met each adversity with a throaty, musical laugh. Sophisticated but not stuffy, a superior creature who never condescended, she proved the maxim that a woman should be, first and foremost, a lady. Her characters flummoxed leading men into stammering or spouting purple prose by wielding the comeback, the put-down, the come-on, all in one sprightly barrage. Cool Claudette. "I can say immodestly that I'm a very good comedienne," Colbert told TIME in 1981. "But I was always fighting that image too. I just never had the luck to play bitches."