Milestones

By Harriet Barovick, Clayton Neuman, Golnoush Niknejad, Logan Orlando, Elspeth Reeve

INDICTED. Four men, KEVIN JAMES, 29, LEVAR WASHINGTON, 25, GREGORY PATTERSON, 21, and HAMMAD SAMANA, 21; of a terrorist conspiracy to attack military sites, synagogues, Israeli officials and other targets in Southern California; in Santa Ana, Calif. The plot was allegedly hatched in prison by James, the leader of a militant Islamic gang, who was aided on the outside by his onetime fellow inmate Washington. All four face life in prison.

JAILED. ROBERT CHAMBERS, 38, a.k.a. the Preppie Killer, whose 1986 killing of teenager Jennifer Levin in Manhattan's Central Park--accidentally, he contended, during "rough sex"--triggered national outrage; for possession of heroin; two years after serving the full 15 years in prison for Levin's murder; in New York City.

AILING. JACQUES CHIRAC, 72, French President, who suffered a blood-vessel problem that blurred his vision and was hospitalized as a precaution since a vascular incident can indicate a ministroke; in Paris.

DIED. NURCHOLISH MADJID, 66, prominent Indonesian intellectual who became known as the conscience of his nation for persistently advocating a moderate form of Islam and insisting that his mostly Muslim country remain secular; of liver and kidney failure; in Jakarta. The author of several books, including the popular Doors to God (he emphasized the plural), he is credited with persuading hard-line President Suharto to step down in 1998.

DIED. JUDE WANNISKI, 69, conservative journalist who, as an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal in the 1970s, coined the phrase "supply-side economics" for the theory, later embraced by Ronald Reagan, that tax cuts spur production and growth; of a heart attack; in Morristown, N.J. A tireless publicity hound, he went on to advise G.O.P. candidates and write the economics tome The Way the World Works, prompting fellow conservative George Will to write, "I wish that I were as confident about something as he is of everything."

DIED. R.L. BURNSIDE, 78, ex-sharecropper and Mississippi blues master who first found fame in the 1990s with the documentary Deep Blues and his recordings for Fat Possum Records, based in Oxford, Miss.; in Memphis. His raw, unrehearsed sound soon drew a cadre of mostly white, alt-rock admirers, some of whom, like Jon Spencer, became collaborators; one of Burnside's pioneering 1998 blues-techno tunes, It's Bad You Know, was later featured on TV's The Sopranos.

DIED. ELWOOD (BUCK) PERRY, 90, enterprising angler who invented structure fishing-- a system of attracting deepwater fish by mapping out the underlying contours of a body of water, which he said revealed the routes taken by traveling fish--and the bottom-bumping Spoonplug lure to facilitate it; in Taylorsville, N.C. Although he patented the lure in 1946, his Spoonplug business did not take off until 1957, when he caught hundreds of bass at a demonstration at supposedly "fished-out" Lake Marie, near Chicago.

DIED. JOSEPH ROTBLAT, 96, Polish-born physicist who quit the Manhattan Project and became a leading critic of nuclear war; in London. A founder of the Pugwash Conferences, a series of cold war--era gatherings of antinuclear scientists from the U.S., the U.S.S.R. and elsewhere, he was a principal author of the group's manifesto, which read, in part, "Remember your humanity, and forget the rest." After decades campaigning for disarmament, he and Pugwash, named for the Nova Scotia town where the group first met, in 1957, were awarded the Peace Prize in 1995.