Milestones

HANNAH BEECHSUSPENDED. ANDI MUHAMMAD GHALIB,53, beleaguered Attorney General of Indonesia, after a probe into former President Suharto's purported ill-gotten wealth unleashed an investigation into his own financial records; in Jakarta. Independent corruption watchdogs allege that Ghalib and his wife inappropriately accepted $1.2 million from businessmen who were being investigated by the Attorney General's office. The ruling-party stalwart denies any impropriety.DIED. SCREAMING LORD SUTCH,58, irreverent leader of Britain's Official Monster Raving Loony party, whose fringe political platform included promises of heated toilet seats for pensioners, of an apparent suicide; in London. Beginning in 1963, the former rock singer added a zany note to British politics, unsuccessfully campaigning some 40 times for Parliament under the slogan: Vote for insanity, you know it makes sense.DIED. BASIL HUME,76, respected spiritual head of England and Wales' 4.2 million Roman Catholics, who walked the line between conservative Vatican encyclicals and reformist British tendencies; in London. As Archbishop of Westminster for 23 years, the former Benedictine monk spun family homilies rather than grand oratory, but he nevertheless ended up in the political spotlight with his opposition to women priests and homosexuality.ARRESTED. KATHLEEN ANN SOLIAH,52, fugitive member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the leftist clique that kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst a quarter-century ago, on murder conspiracy and explosives charges; in St. Paul, Minnesota. Soliah, who was living quietly in a leafy suburb with her doctor husband and three daughters, was nabbed after the America's Most Wanted TV crime program announced a $20,000 FBI reward for her arrest. She had been on the run since the mid-'70s, when the guerrilla group terrorized California with a rash of bank robberies and bombings.RETRIAL ORDERED.ForBETTINO CRAXI,65, disgraced former Italian Prime Minister, on charges of maintaining an illegal Swiss bank account to help fund his Socialist Party, by Italy's highest appeals court; in Milan. The ruling marked the third time the court has dismissed an earlier corruption conviction and ordered another trial for Craxi, who has remained in self-imposed exile in Tunisia since 1994.ELECTED. VAIRA VIKE-FREIBERGA,61, multilingual psychology professor, as President of her native Latvia, by 84 members of the parliament; in Riga. Vike-Freiberga, a compromise candidate who recently relinquished her Canadian citizenship, was elected after five better-known hopefuls all failed to win enough votes in the acrimonious campaign.
It's old and there's no funding, so the Russian Space Agency can't keep space station Mir aloft. We asked those versed in the ways of space, What would you do with Mir?I would turn the Mir space station into a prison in which we would place criminals who are convicted of crimes against humanity. Their sentence is not only isolation in space, but they would be forced to look down on earth to see how interdependent humans are on each other.
--William Shatner, actor, Star Trek

We probably would not do anything with the Mir. It does not fit the mission profile for tourists in space. Our mission plan is to provide the tourist with an artificial-gravity environment by spinning the facility. If you do that on the Mir, it falls apart.
--Gregory Bennett, V.P., Bigelow Aerospace, a firm developing space cruises and hotels

The Mir has far exceeded expectations in 13 years. It should be let go to rest peacefully. More efforts should be devoted to international space stations... The thing is bound to wear out, and that could be catastrophic if it was manned.
--Pete Conrad, astronaut and CEO of Universal Space Lines, a start-up space airline