Milestones

By Harriet Barovick, Elizabeth L. Bland and Sora Song

ACQUITTED. RON CAREY, 64, ex-Teamsters president; of perjury charges stemming from a finding that $855,000 in union funds had been illegally diverted to his 1996 election campaign; in New York City.

SENTENCED. PAULA POUNDSTONE, 41, comedian; to five years' probation, six months of rehabilitation and 200 hr. of community service; for endangering her three adopted and two foster children; in Santa Monica, Calif. Poundstone, whose children are currently in state care, was barred from taking in foster kids again. She admitted, "My drinking helped to create a dangerous situation."

AILING. RUSH LIMBAUGH, 50, conservative radio commentator; from a rare inner-ear ailment that has rendered him virtually deaf. Limbaugh told his 20 million listeners that he planned to continue to broadcast--if necessary, without callers. "All I've lost is my ability to hear," he said. "It doesn't mean I've lost my ability to communicate."

DIED. HERBERT ROSS, 74, choreographer turned film director who collaborated with Neil Simon on five films; in New York City. He jump-started the career of Barbra Streisand in the 1962 Broadway musical I Can Get It for You Wholesale and, in 1977, got Oscar-nominated performances out of Anne Bancroft and Shirley MacLaine in Turning Point and Marsha Mason in The Goodbye Girl.

DIED. WILL COUNTS, 70, photojournalist nominated for a Pulitzer for his coverage of the 1957 desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark.; of cancer; in Bloomington, Ind. Among Counts' searing pictures of the unrest was one of a white girl furiously jeering black student Elizabeth Eckford, 15. Hazel Bryan Massery, the jeerer, later apologized to Eckford. In 1997 Counts photographed the women together.

DIED. HERBERT BLOCK, 91, ferociously nonconformist Washington Post cartoonist known as Herblock who illuminated issues from McCarthyism to campaign fund raising and skewered 13 Presidents; of pneumonia; in Washington. Block won three Pulitzer Prizes and shared a fourth. His images, which included one of Jimmy Carter trying unhappily to get a clear picture of himself on TV, could be withering. Block proudly recalled a Post publisher saying his work prompted Nixon to cancel his subscription four times. In 1994 Block received the Medal of Freedom. His last cartoon, at left, ran on Aug. 26, 2001.