Milestones

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HANNAH BEECHIN COURT. JONATHAN AITKEN,56, embattled British former Cabinet minister, on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with a failed libel suit against the Guardian; in London. When the British daily alleged that a plush Paris weekend Aitken enjoyed in 1993 was funded by a Saudi businessman, the ex-Defense and Treasury Minister responded by suing the paper. But Guardian lawyers produced records contradicting Aitken's claim that his wife had footed the bill, and he dropped the suit amid much public loss of face.DIED. RICARDO RAMIREZ,67, Guatemalan guerrilla who gave up his gun to sign a peace accord in 1996 that ended 36 years of civil war; in Guatemala City. Known by his nom de guerre, Rolando Moran, the leftist leader crusaded against an American-backed military regime that suppressed the rights of the indigenous Mayan Indian majority. But as the armed struggle dragged on and claimed some 100,000 civilian and Indian lives with no apparent hope of resolution, Ramirez turned peacemaker, leading a successful negotiated settlement that provided amnesty for rebels and that promised to trim the military's powers and protect Indian rights.DIED. GEORGE C. WALLACE,79, segregationist governor of Alabama, whose furied fight against the American civil rights movement was immortalized in 1963 when he physically blocked two black students from registering at the University of Alabama; in Montgomery, Alabama. The four-time governor renounced his views on race in 1982, 10 years after an attacker shot him in the back, leaving Wallace wheelchair-bound for the remainder of his life: We were mistaken, he intoned. The Old South is gone.DIED. YANG SHANGKUN,92, hard-line Chinese ex-President, who helped preside over the military assault that bloodied Tiananmen Square in 1989; in Beijing. A Long March veteran who survived China's arduous path to communism, Yang faded into obscurity after Deng Xiaoping's hand-picked successor Jiang Zemin rose to prominence in the 1990s and replaced the aged revolutionary's cronies with his own crop of Shanghai technocrats.CHARGED. SIMON OLE MAKALLA,54, assistant director of the Kenya Wildlife Service, with the murder of a British tourist in 1988; in Nairobi. Although Ken-yan officials initially claimed that Julie Ward had been mauled to death by wild animals in the Masai Mara National Reserve, Ward's father doubted that her mutilated and charred remains could have been the result of an animal attack. Two game wardens were tried for her murder in 1992, but they were found not guilty; this is the first time their superior, Makalla, has been legally implicated in the death.FREED. JANI DAKO,44, Albanian governor of the ethnic Greek stronghold of Gjirokastra, after mobster gunmen held him hostage for 48 hours; in Lazarati, Albania. The governor's release was secured with help from the Greek consul general. With violence raging next door, Athens has been trying to safeguard the civil and religious rights of the estimated 400,000 ethnic Greeks in southern Albania.Malaysia's current political squabbles are nothing new. Even the birth of the country 35 years ago was marred by a dispute that left Brunei out of the federation and out of luck.When pretty Catherine Loh was elected Miss Malaysia last April, the pert beauty from the oil-rich British protectorate of Brunei fully expected to preside over the independence ceremonies of the newly formed Federation of Malaysia. But that was before Brunei withdrew from the planned federation in a state of pique, leaving Malaya, Singapore, Sarawak and North Borneo to go it alone. Brunei's defection not only left this week's joyous celebrations without a beauty queen, but it also took Malaysia out of the running for the Miss Universe contest. The beauty queen flap was . . . on the list of last-minute labor pains attending the long-awaited birth of Malaysia.--TIME, Sept. 20, 1963