MILESTONES

DIED. VLADIMIR NECHAI, 60, head of one of Russia's top nuclear-weapons research centers; by apparent suicide; in his office at Snezhinsk. Nechai is said to have been despondent over his money-strapped nation's neglect of the once indispensable facility. Workers there have not been paid in months.

DIED. BERNARD LAFFERTY, 51, the reportedly hard-drinking and spendthrift butler who won the trust of tobacco heiress Doris Duke; of yet-to-be-determined causes; in Los Angeles. After prosecutors cleared him of allegations that he had conspired to hasten Duke's death, he resigned his lucrative position as co-executor of her $1.2 billion estate and settled for $4.5 million plus $500,000 a year.

DIED. MICHAEL BURNETT, 67, longtime criminal and key government informer; of a heart attack; at the U.S. penitentiary in Atlanta. He helped expose major municipal bribery scandals in New York City and Chicago in the 1980s.

DIED. JEAN-BEDEL BOKASSA, 75, ex-Central African President and self-proclaimed Emperor who ruled for 13 years as one of Africa's most brutal despots; in Bangui. His lavish, bizarre and murderous ways embarrassed his chief patron, France, which finally helped depose him in 1979.

DIED. ARTUR AXMANN, 83, head of Hitler's notorious Nazi youth organization; in Berlin. Axmann claimed to have witnessed Hitler's 1945 suicide.

DIED. JUNIUS JAYEWARDENE, 90, former President of Sri Lanka, whose reforms helped launch its economy but whose inability to stop a civil war has brought the country to a crash and cost it 50,000 lives so far; in Colombo.

DIED. ELEANOR DULLES, 101, head of the State Department's crucial Berlin desk during the cold war 1950s; in Washington. The sister of then Secretary of State John Dulles and then CIA Director Allen Dulles, she helped West Berlin recover from World War II.