Milestones

By Georgia Harbison, Ian Judson, Daniel S. Levy, Jodie Morse, Michele Orecklin, Alain L. Sanders and Joel Stein

ARRESTED. TWO NEW SUSPECTS being questioned in the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; for attempting to cross the Pakistani border into Afghanistan without proper papers. Pakistani officials say they are interrogating the two, a Saudi and a Sudanese, over possible links to Osama bin Laden, the millionaire Islamic fundamentalist waging a holy war against the U.S. who is thought by many to be behind the bombings.

DIED. JERRY LOFTIS, top, 29, adrenaline-infused athlete who pioneered the insanely extreme sport of sky surfing; after his parachute failed to deploy; in Quincy, Ill.

DIED. JIM MURRAY, 78, irrepressible Los Angeles Times sports columnist whose witty dispatches made him a most valuable player on the sports beat; of cardiac arrest; in Los Angeles. Murray spent 37 years at the Times giving sports junkies a morning fix of his laugh-a-line musings. One of four sports writers to score a Pulitzer Prize for commentary, Murray greeted his award with characteristic humor: "This is going to make it a little easier on the guy who writes my obit."

DIED. DOROTHY WEST, 91, sole surviving voice of the Harlem Renaissance; in Boston. West was just a teen when she tied with Zora Neale Hurston for second place in a short-story contest, winning swift admission into the gifted clique of black intellectuals. The daughter of an ex-slave, West settled in tony Martha's Vineyard, Mass., and in 1995, after years of literary silence, published The Wedding, a novel about the black bourgeoisie that she dedicated to her editor, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

DIED. JULIAN GREEN, 97, enigmatic American author embraced by France as a distinguished homme de lettres; in Paris. The bilingual Green compared writing in English to "wearing clothes that were not made for me." He wrote under the name Julien to further Francofy himself, penning more than 25 darkly brooding novels, plays and essays and Journal, a multivolume diary of his life.