Milestones Aug. 25, 2003

DIED. IDI AMIN, 80, utterly ruthless former dictator of Uganda; in Saudi Arabia, where he lived a life of luxury in exile with one of several wives and 22 of his children. During an eight-year reign that plunged a prosperous nation into desperate poverty, the onetime military boxing champ used slaughter as a form of statecraft. The son of a peasant farmer and a mother who practiced sorcery, the nearly illiterate Amin joined the British colonial army in 1946. Nine years after Uganda achieved independence in 1962, he led a successful coup, then embarked on murderous campaigns against political opponents and...

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