Milestones

By Tam Gray, Daniel Levy, Lina Lofaro, Joel Stein, Flora Tartakovsky and Chris Taylor

DIED. MIKE MCALARY, 41, tabloid columnist; of colon cancer; in New York City. Over the course of his career, the pugnacious, Pulitzer-prizewinning journalist wrote extensively--and often empathically--about the city's police for the New York Daily News and the New York Post. But he was no apologist: in 1997 he broke the story of a brutal police beating of a Haitian immigrant.

DIED. ANITA HOFFMAN, 56, social activist; of breast cancer; in San Francisco. Wife of the late Yippie Abbie, Hoffman joined her husband in some of his more outlandish activities, such as disrupting trading at the New York Stock Exchange by showering the floor with money. She also supported him for years while he hid from the police to avoid drug charges.

DIED. CATHAL GOULDING, 75, I.R.A. leader; in Dublin, Ireland. Goulding helped revive the I.R.A. in 1945, and while serving as its chief of staff, he attempted to move the group away from military confrontation. In 1972 he called a cease-fire, creating a split between his Official I.R.A. branch and the Provisional I.R.A., which sought continued armed strife.

DIED. JEAN-CLAUDE FOREST, 68, comic-strip artist; near Paris. Best remembered as the creator of the sci-fi cheesecake character Barbarella, he also designed the sets for the 1968 Jane Fonda film.

DIED. ANATOLI RYBAKOV, 87, Russian author; in New York City. Rybakov started writing stories part time while driving a truck. His children's book The Dirk, published in 1950, was an immediate success and admired by Stalin. On the other hand, it took years for him to get his epic novel Children of the Arbat published. When the work--which freely discusses Stalin's terrors--finally appeared in 1986, it sold more than 1 million copies in the Soviet Union.

DIED. HURD HATFIELD, 80, actor; in Monkstown, Ireland. Best remembered as the lead in 1945's The Picture of Dorian Gray, the Manhattan-born Hatfield was famed for his arrogant manner. He appeared in such movies as Jean Renoir's Diary of a Chambermaid.