Milestones

By By Melissa August, Harriet Barovick, Jeninne Lee-St. John, Julie Norwell

NOMINATED. Jawad al-Maliki, 56, hard-line Shi'ite leader; to replace outgoing Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari after he agreed to abandon a bid to keep his post; in Baghdad. Al-Maliki was endorsed by Iraq's Kurdish President, Jalal Talabani, as well as other key Sunni Arab and Kurdish leaders who said they would support him in the hope of ending a months-long political deadlock.

CONVICTED. George Ryan, 72, ex-Governor of Illinois; of racketeering, mail fraud, making false statements to FBI agents and tax evasion, in one of the biggest corruption scandals in state history; in Chicago. The accusations ended the Republican's political career in 2003, even as he basked in global acclaim for commuting the sentences of all of Illinois' death-row inmates.

DIED. Walter Pearson, 77, stogie-chomping poker legend credited with inventing the now standard "freeze-out" poker, in which players start with the same amount of money and play until one of them wins all the chips; in Las Vegas. Known as Puggy, he won the World Series of Poker in 1973 and promoted the game with antics like attending tournaments in Viking, cowboy or other chest-beating regalia.

DIED. Arthur Hertzberg, 84, contrarian Jewish scholar and civil rights activist; near Westwood, N.J. After Israel's 1967 Six-Day War, he caused a stir by calling for a Palestinian state. Yet when the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, a liberal Roman Catholic priest and peace activist, attacked Israel for "domestic repression," Hertzberg rebuked him for "old-fashioned theological anti-Semitism." Determined to entwine Judaism with social causes, he called the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum the "national cathedral of American Jewry's Jewishness" and suggested Jews expand their focus. Instead of offering "platitudes," he said, "a rabbi should be where the real issues of society are."

DIED. Warren Platner, 86, architect and designer whose graceful steel-wire chairs, tables and ottomans for the Knoll furniture company have been continuously produced since 1966; in New Haven, Conn. Platner, who worked with Eero Saarinen and I.M. Pei, had a role in some striking examples of modernism, including the interior design of Chicago's Water Tower Place, a vertical shopping mall, and Windows on the World, the restaurant that sat atop New York City's World Trade Center.

DIED. Louise Smith, 89, scrappy stock-car racer of the 1940s and '50s and the first woman to be inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame; in Anderson, S.C. In 1946 her reputation as a teenage daredevil in her hometown of Greenville, S.C., led Bill France, who co-founded NASCAR the next year, to recruit her as a draw for fans in a local race. Before retiring in 1956 at the urging of her husband--whose brand-new Ford she had totaled in a 1947 race--Smith won 38 events in various classes. "I was just born to be wild," she said.

DIED. Ellen Kuzwayo, 91, prize-winning South African author and a founder of the antiapartheid movement; in Soweto. Imprisoned in 1977, she was later an advocate for the rights of women and helped launch the Urban Foundation to pressure the government to allow blacks to own homes. With her 1985 autobiography, Call Me Woman, she became the first black writer to win South Africa's prestigious CNA literary prize. In the country's first all-race elections in 1994, the African National Congress member won a seat in Parliament, where she served five years.

DIED. Scott Crossfield, 84, civilian aircraft designer and cold war test pilot who in 1953 became the first man to fly at Mach 2, twice the speed of sound--a record that spurred his rival, U.S. Air Force ace Chuck Yeager, to surpass it a month later; in a crash of Crossfield's single-engine Cessna in the mountains north of Atlanta. One of the post--World War II supersonic-jet aviators whom author Tom Wolfe said had "the right stuff," Crossfield dismissed the macho image of his field, saying that for most pilots he knew, the "main interest outside of work was raising apricots."