Milestones

By Ann Marie Bonardi, Amanda Bower, Lina Lofaro, Ellin Martens, Sora Song, Heather Won Tesoriero, Josh Tyrangiel and Rebecca Winters

REACHED SUMMIT. ERIK WEIHENMAYER, 32, blind mountaineer; on Mount Everest. The Golden, Colo., climber is the first blind person ever to scale the world's highest peak. Among his 18 climbing teammates was Sherman Bull, 64, the oldest person ever to reach the summit.

AILING. CORINA MORARIU, 23, former No. 1 ranked women's doubles player and 1999 Wimbledon women's doubles champion with Lindsay Davenport; with a rare form of leukemia; in Florida. Doctors estimated that Morariu had been sick for months, even while playing the grueling WTA tour.

PLEADED GUILTY. STEVE MADDEN, 44, shoe designer and proponent of the platform sneaker; to stock fraud and money laundering; in U.S. District Court. Madden, whose fans include Sarah Michelle Gellar and MTV's Ananda Lewis, agreed to pay some $8.2 million in fines and to relinquish the directorship of his company. He will probably face 41 to 51 months in prison.

SENTENCED. SAAD EDDIN IBRAHIM, 62, sociology professor at the American University in Cairo and Egypt's best-known democracy advocate; to seven years in prison for defaming that country; in Cairo. The government claimed that Ibrahim, also a U.S. citizen, smeared the country by alleging election fraud and discrimination against Christians. The harsh verdict appalled democracy supporters, and the U.S. State Department said it was "deeply troubled."

DIED. WHITMAN MAYO, 70, easygoing actor best known as "Good Goobily Goop" Grady, Fred Sanford's sidekick on the 1970s hit sitcom Sanford and Son; in Atlanta, Ga. At 42, Mayo was offered one episode's work on the Redd Foxx series but became a mainstay of the show for the next five years, even spawning a short-lived spin-off, Grady.

DIED. MAURICE J. NOBLE, 91, multi-award-winning animation designer: in La Crescenta, Calif. Noble worked on some of the country's best-loved animated features, including Pinocchio, Dumbo, Fantasia, Bambi and Snow White, as well as many of the Road Runner and Bugs Bunny cartoons. With two World War II buddies, Theodore Geisel, also known as Dr. Seuss, and director Chuck Jones, he helped create the original TV movie version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

DIED. TAD SZULC, 74, foreign correspondent extraordinaire for the New York Times; of cancer; in Washington. Szulc broke the story of the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba and later wrote a biography of Fidel Castro. Born in Poland, Szulc came to the U.S. in 1947. He spoke six languages and reported from Asia, Latin America and Europe.

DIED. PHILIP W. BUCHEN, 85, scholarly lawyer and presidential adviser; in Washington. Buchen led a secret group in 1974 that spent three months developing a plan under which his old friend and law partner, Vice President Gerald Ford, would assume the presidency if Nixon were to resign. Ford had no idea the plan existed. Appointed counsel to the new President, Buchen advised him on the controversial Nixon pardon. "I could see that he had already made up his mind," Buchen said later, "and it was my job to find out how he could do it, rather than whether he should do it."