MILESTONES

DIED. MIKE SYNAR, 45, former U.S. Representative; of brain cancer; in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Synar style was anything but politics as usual. For 16 years, the Democrat served a conservative district in Oklahoma while embracing a range of liberal positions like gun control. He finally lost his seat in the 1994 G.O.P. sweep.

DIED. DUANE HANSON, 70, sculptor; of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma; in Boca Raton, Florida. Hanson's popular, Pop-influenced sculptures captured humanity at its most humdrum--a gawking tourist or a burdened shopper, each life-size, dressed in real clothing and rendered with such realism that passers-by were often unaware they were in the company of art, not life.

DIED. FRANCOIS MITTERRAND, 79, former President of France; of cancer; in Paris. He was a man of frustrating arrogance, a man of contradictory impulses--but above all, as even his opponents acknowledged, Mitterrand was a man of France. The son of a railroad employee turned vinegar producer, Mitterrand went to Paris to study law in 1934. Drafted at the outbreak of World War II, he was imprisoned by the Germans in 1940. He escaped, co-founding a Resistance group with a network of ex-prisoners in 1943. After the liberation, he was elected to the National Assembly, and between 1947 and 1957 he held 11 Cabinet positions. But with Charles de Gaulle's ascension to the leadership of France, Mitterrand began a quarter-century in the opposition. Flanked by the Gaullists and the Communists, he forged the French Socialist Party from the motley fragments of the non-Communist left. In 1981 he finally captured the presidency with the promise of an economic renaissance for the recession-bound country. In power for the first time since 1936, the Socialists launched a veritable revolution, nationalizing banks, raising the minimum wage and installing a wealth tax. Though these moves did spur consumer-driven growth, they also led to runaway inflation, a spiraling trade deficit and a sagging franc. Less than two years into the revolution, Mitterrand imposed stringent austerity measures to shore up the franc, ultimately turning his back on leftist economics. In foreign policy, Mitterrand, though instinctively hostile to U.S. domination, nonetheless proved a staunch ally at critical moments--like the 1991 Gulf War, to which he committed French combat troops. Determined to secure France's position in the post-cold war era, Mitterrand threw his full weight behind the cause of European integration, with the Franco-German axis as its motor. Mitterrand also launched some $6 billion worth of landmarks, firmly placing his imprint on the Paris skyline. His imprint too was in lawbooks for abolishing the death penalty. The disastrous defeat of the Socialists in 1993 tarnished the closing moments his career--and his beginnings were darkened as well by revelations in 1994 that during World War II he worked for the collaborationist Vichy regime before joining the Resistance. He was gravely ill from prostate cancer when he handed over the presidency on May 17 to his longtime rival, Neo-Gaullist Jacques Chirac. Mitterrand was the longest-serving President in French history.

DIED. ARVID FREDBORG, 80, Swedish journalist whose 1943 book, Behind the Steel Wall, was one of the earliest exposes of the extent of Nazi Germany's systematic genocide of the Jews; in Stockholm.