Milestones Jul. 24, 2006

KILLED. Shamil Basayev, 41, Chechen terrorist who masterminded numerous large-scale attacks on Russian civilians, including a siege of a school in the town of Beslan that killed 331 people, most of them children, and a 2002 attack on a theater in Moscow leaving 171 people dead; when a bomb in his car exploded in the republic of Ingushetia, bordering Chechnya. While Basayev's supporters said the explosion was accidental, Russian forces said they killed Basayev as part of a long-planned sting operation.

DIED. Syd Barrett, 60, brilliant, troubled recluse who was the original leader of the seminal psychedelic rock band Pink Floyd and wrote almost all its early music; of undisclosed causes; in Cambridge, England. In 1968, a year after the release of Pink Floyd's acclaimed debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Barrett--who named the group after blues musicians Pink Anderson and Floyd Council--left the band after a breakdown that was caused, in part, by heavy LSD use. An icon to musicians from David Bowie to Robyn Hitchcock, Barrett, who lived in obscurity at his mother's house in Cambridge from 1970 until his death, was saluted by his former bandmates in the songs Wish You Were Here and Shine On You Crazy Diamond.

DIED. Catherine Leroy, 60, fearless, diminutive, French-born war photographer whose raw, intimate glimpses of atrocities during the Vietnam War--among them Corpsman in Anguish, a well-known 1967 photo of a Navy corpsman hunched over his friend's dead body--appeared in LIFE, Look and other publications and won her the prestigious George Polk Award; of cancer; in Santa Monica, Calif.

DIED. John Money, 84, pioneering Johns Hopkins University sex researcher and psychologist who, during the 1960s, when any form of sexual ambiguity was deemed freakish, helped establish and legitimize the study of sexual identity; in Towson, Md. Stressing the psychological effects of gender issues, he consulted on the first sex-change operation at Hopkins and coined the terms gender identity and gender role.

DIED. June Allyson, 88, wholesome, gravel-voiced actress dubbed the "girl next door" for her frequent turns in the '40s and '50s as the loyal, adoring girlfriend or wife in such films as Two Girls and a Sailor, with Van Johnson, and The Glenn Miller Story, opposite Jimmy Stewart; in Ojai, Calif. Allyson was upbeat about her Hollywood reputation, but it doomed her efforts to take on grittier roles. The Shrike (1955), in which she played a harsh wife who drives her husband mad, was a flop. But she claimed she couldn't live up to the hype. "In real life," she joked, "I'm a poor dressmaker and a terrible cook." More recently, Allyson became known to younger viewers as the spokeswoman for Depend adult-incontinence products.