Milestones

By Melissa August, Val Castronovo, Matthew Cooper, Daren Fonda, Ellin Martens, Benjamin Nugent, Julie Rawe, Flora Tartakovsky and Josh Tyrangiel

ELECTED. VASHTI MCKENZIE, 53, charismatic Baltimore, Md., pastor and former journalist, as the first female bishop in the 213-year history of the African Methodist Episcopal Church; in Cincinnati, Ohio.

DEPORTED. MARY MACMAKIN, 72, American relief worker jailed for four days in Kabul, after providing home-based work for local women, who have been barred from most jobs since the Taliban came to power in 1996; from Afghanistan.

IMPEACHED. DAVID BROCK, 64, Chief Justice of New Hampshire, on four counts of ethics violations, including an alleged attempt to influence a decision in a lower court; in Concord. His senate trial starts Aug. 21.

DIED. JUSTIN PIERCE, 25, skateboarding star of the controversial film Kids (1995); by hanging himself in a hotel room the day before the New York premiere of his last film, Pigeonholed; in Las Vegas.

CLEARED. The U.S. government, of responsibility for the deaths of some 80 Branch Davidians near Waco, Texas, during the 1993 siege by federal agents; by an advisory panel of jurors in a wrongful-death suit brought by relatives and surviving cult members; in Waco. A federal judge will render the final verdict.

DIED. JAN KARSKI, 86, former Polish diplomat who provided to the West early eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust in World War II, and whose reports on the Warsaw ghetto and a Nazi death camp led to the Allies' statement in 1942 condemning German crimes against the Jews; in Washington.

DIED. ROBERT RUNCIE, 78, outspoken Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1980s who criticized Margaret Thatcher and angered Prince Charles and Diana by recounting private conversations with them to his biographer, and whose efforts to improve relations with Rome led the Pope, in 1982, to pray with him in the cathedral where Thomas a Becket was murdered in 1170; in Hertfordshire, England.