Milestones

SURRENDERED. Johnny Htoo, left, child soldier who, along with twin brother Luther, led a band of ethnic Karen rebels known as God's Army against Burma's military junta in the late 1990s; in southern Burma. Htoo, believed to be about 18 years old today, turned himself in to government forces along with eight fellow rebels earlier this month, according to reports. The brothers, revered by followers who believed they had mystic powers and could not be hurt by bullets or land mines, fled to a Thai refugee camp in 2001, where Luther reportedly still lives with his wife and child.

CLEARED. Ciaran O'Reilly, 46, Nuin Dunlop, 34, Damien Moran, 26, Karen Fallon, 35, and Deirdre Clancy, 36, of criminal damage to a U.S. Navy aircraft at Shannon Airport in February 2003; in Dublin. While the five antiwar activists admitted to causing $2.5 million of damage by attacking the plane with hammers and an axe, they said they were acting to protect lives and property in Iraq. The jury took less than five hours to reach a unanimous decision, an outcome the U.S. embassy plans to discuss with the Irish government.

SENTENCED. Vasana Puemlarp, 65, Prinya Nakchudtree, 65, and Virachai Naewboonnien, 65, Thai election officials; to four years in prison, for abuse of power and misconduct related to ill-fated parliamentary elections in April; by Thailand's Criminal Court; in Bangkok. The three were found guilty of mismanaging the poll—which was boycotted by the country's opposition parties and later invalidated by the Constitutional Court—and allowing unqualified candidates to run illegally, giving a boost to the ruling Thai Rak Thai party. The men, who subsequently resigned their posts, were released on bail Friday and will appeal the verdict, which also bars them from political activities for 10 years.

DIED. Mako, 72, actor who, as co-founder of East West Players—the first Asian-American drama troupe—was hailed as "the godfather of Asian-American theater"; of esophageal cancer; in Somis, California. Born Makoto Iwamatsu in Kobe, Japan, he went to the U.S. as a teen and discovered acting. Roles for Asians then were demeaningly comic, written almost exclusively in pidgin English. But Mako's portrayal of the Chinese coolie Po-han in 1966's The Sand Pebbles, although in broken English, rose above stereotype and won him an Oscar nomination.

DIED. Carl Brashear, 75, first black master deep-sea diver for the U.S. Navy, whose triumph over Kentucky poverty, racism and leg amputation inspired the 2000 movie Men of Honor, starring Cuba Gooding Jr.; in Portsmouth, Virginia. Brashear, a sharecropper's son who finished only the 7th grade, joined the Navy in 1950 and, after four years of pleas, was admitted to diving school—unofficially, it was for whites only—where classmates taunted him with racial slurs and death threats. In 1966, while Brashear was serving on the U.S.S. Hoist, a loose steel pipe careered across the deck and crushed his lower left leg. Intensive rehab after the leg was amputated helped persuade Navy doctors to clear him for diving—although he had to prove he could climb with 136 kg on his back to simulate diving tanks. After Men of Honor premiered, Brashear was deluged with letters from amputees. He answered every one, sharing his message of relentless optimism. "It's not a sin to be down," he liked to say. "It's a sin to stay down."

DIED. Frederick Mosteller, 89, preeminent statistician and founding chairman of Harvard University's statistics department who popularized the application of statistical data to politics and sports; in Falls Church, Virginia. Mosteller first showed his knack for laws of probability as a teenager, while working on a road crew that played poker during rain delays. In 1952, after mulling over the St. Louis Cardinals' 1946 World Series win over the Boston Red Sox, he published the first known academic paper on baseball statistics. A stronger team on paper would often lose to a weaker team, he proved, simply because of chance. Other problems he tackled: in warfare, how strings of bombs would fall; why pollsters erred in calling the 1948 election for Dewey over Truman; and the authorship of the Federalist papers, by analyzing word frequency. A droll defender of his field, he once wrote, "It is easy to lie with statistics, but easier to lie without them."

Numbers
$4 Daily salary for soldiers in the Afghan National Army
$12 Estimated daily pay for Taliban fighters, whose numbers have increased by as many as 4,000 in the past year

127 Number of pirate attacks worldwide in the first half of 2006
33 Number of those attacks that occurred in Indonesian waters, making up 26% of the total

9,000 Number of candidates in the Democratic Republic of Congo's elections on July 30, the country's first in 40 years
$450 million Amount the U.N. has spent on expenses, including ballots for Congo's 50,000 voting bureaus, making it the costliest U.N.-assisted election in history

36% Percentage of Americans surveyed last year who said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded in 2003
50% Percentage surveyed this year who say that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in 2003

1,000 Estimated age, in years, of a leatherbound Irish book of psalms, written in Latin in medieval times and found in a bog in Ireland by a construction worker
200 Years since a text from that era was last discovered in Ireland, home of great medieval documents like the Book of Kells