Milestones

SENTENCED. Sergei Skripal, 55, former Russian military intelligence colonel, to 13 years in prison for high treason; by the Moscow District Military Court in a closed-door trial; in Moscow. While on a mission in Britain in 1995, Skripal was recruited as an agent by MI6, the overseas arm of British intelligence, to reveal the identities of several dozen Russian secret agents stationed in Europe. He retired in 1999, but used his intelligence connections to keep working for the British, earning an estimated $100,000 before his arrest in December 2004. CHARGED. Nikolai Zavadsky, 54, husband of the late Larisa Zavadsky, curator at Russia's Hermitage Museum, and his son, also Nikolai Zavadsky, 25; with theft; in St. Petersburg. Zavadsky senior confessed to helping his wife smuggle 53 items, including gifts to Russia's last Tsar, out of the Hermitage. A further 221 exhibits, worth some $5 million, remain missing, prompting President Vladimir Putin to order an inventory of all 50 million artworks kept in Russian museums. According to his lawyer, Zavadsky stole to buy insulin for his diabetic wife, whose curator's salary was well below the national average income. DIED. Robert McCullough, 64, who changed the U.S. civil-rights movement in 1961 when he refused to pay a $100 fine for requesting service, along with eight other black students, at a whites-only lunch counter in South Carolina, and opted instead to serve 30 days of hard labor in prison; in Rock Hill, South Carolina. What was dubbed the "jail, no bail" tactic relieved activists of financial burden and inspired similar protests. "I guess if we had to do it today ... we'd do it again," he said in 2001. DIED. Yasuo Takei, 76, founder and former chairman of consumer-credit company Takefuji and Japan's second-richest man; in Tokyo. Takei, worth an estimated $5.6 billion, started Takefuji in 1966 with just four employees and grew it into one of Japan's most profitable companies, famously claiming to have slept only two hours a night on his road to success. He resigned in disgrace in 2004 after being convicted of illegally tapping the phone of a journalist who had written negative articles on the company. DIED. Melissa Hayden, 83, lyrical, vibrant ballerina who became an international standout in George Balanchine's famously starless New York City Ballet; in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Such was her status in a company known for downplaying individual artists that when she announced her retirement in 1973, Balanchine created a work in her honor, Cortege Hongrois, that remains in the company's repertoire. Blunt, generous and emotional, Hayden, who taught until her death, dazzled in such diverse ballets as the lighthearted Stars and Stripes, with music by John Phillip Sousa, and Illuminations, an allegorical meditation on the life of Rimbaud. DIED. Mike Douglas, 81, ever-polite, even-keeled—and hugely successful—early TV talk-show host, whose 90-minute Mike Douglas Show aired from 1961 to 1982; in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. As a big-band singer, the World War II veteran made the pop charts with the soapy 1966 hit, The Men in My Little Girl's Life. Over two decades he hosted guests from a string of sitting and former U.S. Presidents to a preschooler named Tiger Woods (whose golf skills prompted fellow guest Bob Hope to say, "Whatever drugs that kid is on, I want some"). The show was, Douglas insisted, "really a music show, with a whole lot of talk and laughter in between numbers." DIED. James Van Allen , 91, venerated physicist who discovered that Earth is surrounded by two belts of radiation, which were later named for him; in Iowa City, Iowa. In 1958 Van Allen, below center, with rocket designers William Pickering and Wernher von Braun, posed for one of the iconic photographs of the space age: the three men held a model of Explorer 1 over their heads the night the satellite—the U.S.'s first—went into orbit, four months after Sputnik. In a belated effort to add an element of scientific pursuit to the space race, Van Allen had been asked to design a ride-along experiment to hunt for charged particles, or cosmic rays. Finding the radiation belts, he later said, "was like going hunting for rabbits and encountering an elephant instead."