Milestones

DIED. RICHARD HELMS, 89, steely spy and former CIA director who vigilantly guarded some of the cold war's darkest secrets before being fired by Richard Nixon for refusing to embroil the agency in a Watergate cover-up; in Washington, D.C. Helms played a critical role in plotting the assassination attempts on foreign leaders (including Cuba's Fidel Castro) and overthrowing Marxist Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1971. Tall and dashingly good-looking, Helms mastered the art of spy craft at the wartime Office of Strategic Services before it became the CIA.

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ACQUITTED. MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ, 45, provocative French writer; of charges of inciting racial and religious hatred during an interview in which he labeled Islam as "the stupidest religion"; in Paris. Ruling against the Muslim groups that filed the complaint, the court said that Houellebecq's comments "were not intended to in-sult the followers of the religion in question."

DIED. RICHARD HARRIS, 72, hell-raising, Oscar-nominated Irish actor known to his generation for lead roles in This Sporting Life (1963) and Camelot (1967), and to younger audiences as Professor Albus Dumbledore, the wise old wizard in the Harry Potter series; in London. A notorious carousing buddy of Peter O'Toole and the late Richard Burton, Harris once described his face as "five miles of bad country road." He had just finished filming the second Harry Potter film.

DIED. ADOLPH GREEN, 87, lyricist, librettist, playwright and performer who co-wrote hit Broadway musicals such as On the Town and the screenplay for Singin' in the Rain during a 60-year partnership with Betty Comden; in Manhattan. The couple was artistically inseparable and gave postwar America its most memorable Manhattan geography lesson?"The Bronx is up and the Battery down"?in the lyrics to New York, New York (A Hell of a Town).

DIED. PAUL WELLSTONE, 58, liberal Democrat senator from Minnesota, who was running head-to-head with Republican Norm Coleman in one of this year's most competitive Senate races; in a plane crash in Minnesota. Wellstone's reelection was seen as vital for the Democrats' control of the Senate.

DIED. MANUEL ALVAREZ BRAVO, 100, considered Mexico's greatest photographer; in Mexico City. Along with Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco, Bravo led the country's artistic renaissance, which blossomed after the revolution of 1910-1921.

DIED. QUEEN GERALDINE OF THE ALBANIANS, 87, widow of King Zog and one of the last of Europe's exiled monarchs; in Tirana. Known as "The White Rose of Hungary" this former aristocratic beauty was finally permitted to return to Albania last June.

AWARDED. TO YANN MARTEL, 39, Spanish-born Canadian novelist; the newly renamed Man Booker Prize and its purse of $75,000 for Life of Pi, a fable about a young boy shipwrecked for a year with a Bengal tiger; in London. Organizers recently suggested that American writers might be nominated for the award as soon as 2004; currently, only writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth are eligible.

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