MILESTONES

By Melissa August; Peter Bailey; Elizabeth L. Bland; William Han; Kate Novack; Julie Rawe; Elizabeth Sampson

RE-ELECTED. JOHN HOWARD, 65, conservative Australian Prime Minister; to a fourth term, in a solid victory over Mark Latham. Howard's decision to send 2,000 troops to Iraq last year and his steadfast support for the war have been unpopular, but the election hinged mostly on the economy, which is booming.

CLEARED. ALLERGAN, a California-based pharmaceutical company, and dermatologist ARNOLD KLEIN, 59; of charges that Klein poisoned the wife of former movie-studio head Mike Medavoy with Allergan's Botox injections. During the five-week trial, Irena Medavoy alleged that she became ill after Klein, who was an Allergan consultant, used the company's Botox to treat her migraine headaches. A jury rejected the malpractice claim.

DIED. JACQUES DERRIDA, 74, French philosopher and intellectual demigod; of pancreatic cancer; in Paris. Born into a Jewish family in Algeria, he earned his reputation with a series of philosophical works that combined daunting academic virtuosity with an enlightened playfulness. A man of immense charm, he was the godfather of deconstruction, a critical approach that emphasizes ambiguity, self-reference and multiple, shifting meanings and that unravels texts by teasing out the latent contradictions in them. Although his writings are notoriously elusive, their influence on literary criticism--and the culture at large--has been immeasurable.

DIED. GORDON COOPER, 77, one of NASA's original seven astronauts; in Ventura, Calif. Famously casual in his approach to pilot training--and famously brilliant at it nonetheless--Cooper flew twice into orbit, as the sole pilot of the last Mercury mission in 1963 and as commander of Gemini 5 in 1965. For a time, Cooper held the world record for time logged in space, 222 hours, but his strap-it-on-and-go approach served him less well in the lunar program, when NASA preferred more by-the-book pilots. He never got a trip to the moon--a loss more for NASA, many space historians believe, than for Cooper.

DIED. MAURICE WILKINS, 88, British Nobel laureate who helped discover the double-helix structure of DNA; in London. With his colleague (and frequent adversary) Rosalind Franklin at King's College in London, he came up with a clear X-ray image of DNA. Within weeks of receiving the photograph, James Watson and Francis Crick built a model of the giant molecule's double-spiral structure. Watson, Crick and Wilkins later shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

DIED. YANG HUANYI, late 90s, believed to be the last writer and speaker of a rare language used exclusively by women; in Jiangyong, China. Nushu, Mandarin for "women's script," was used to share emotions, fears and sorrows, particularly laments in marriage.

DIED. JOHN KELLEY, 97, Massachusetts native who ran the Boston Marathon a record 61 times from 1928 to 1992; in South Yarmouth, Mass. In 1935, armed with a lucky handkerchief and 15 chocolate pills, he took a subway, a train and a bus from his home to the starting line, and clinched his first Boston victory. He won again in 1945 and placed second seven times. In 1993 the city honored him with a statue near the base of Heartbreak Hill.