Milestones

OPENED. THE GATES, 7,500 saffron-colored fabric panels hanging from 4.9-m.-tall portals along 37 km. of walkway in Central Park; in New York City. The brainchild of duo Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the public art installation took 26 years of planning and $20 million to execute, but will be remarkably short-lived: The Gates come down on Feb. 28.

NAMED. LIEUTENANT GENERAL DJOKO SANTOSO, 52, as Chief of Staff of the Indonesian army; in a military shake-up in which President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono also named new chiefs of the air force and navy; in Jakarta. Santoso replaces hard-liner General Ryamizard Ryacudu and is considered a top candidate to replace the soon-to-retire General Endriartono Sutarto as overall commander of the armed forces. Some see his selection as a move by Yudhoyono to gain greater control over the military, Indonesia’s most powerful institution.

ESTABLISHED. BUS SERVICE between Srinagar, on the Indian side of the divided Kashmir region, and Muzaffarabad, on the Pakistani side; in Islamabad. The route, agreed upon during the first visit to Pakistan in 15 years by an Indian foreign minister, will open on April 7. It is the first to cross Kashmir’s Line of Control since the region was divided in 1948.

DIED. DOROTHY STANG, 74, American nun who spent decades fighting efforts by illegal loggers and ranchers to appropriate vast areas of land in the Amazon rain forest; after being shot in the face by gunmen, just days after she met with Brazil’s Human-Rights Secretary to report death threats against local farmers; near Anapu, Brazil. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva sent federal investigators and the first of 2,000 troops to the region, calling for a crackdown on violence against land activists.

DIED. DICK WEBER, 75, skinny, onetime postal worker who became bowling’s biggest star at the height of its popularity in the 1960s; at his home in Florissant, Missouri. Unfailingly polite but a self-described “ham,” the Hall of Famer helped found the Professional Bowlers Association (PBA) in 1958 and won 10 of the first 23 PBA tournaments, 26 tour events and six seniors titles. His promotional efforts for the sport included bowling on a Miami beach and aiming for ketchup bottles and lava lamps on David Letterman’s late-night TV show.

DIED. ALFRED SIRVEN, 77, former senior executive of French oil company Elf-Aquitaine, jailed for his role in France’s biggest-ever corporate-graft scandal; in Deauville, France. Sirven and his boss, Loik Le Floch Prigent, were convicted in November 2003 of siphoning large sumsSirven alone allegedly amassed over $222 millionfrom the then state-owned Elf-Aquitaine between 1989 and 1993 to buy political favors and fund luxurious lifestyles. Sirven received five years in jail in 2001 and was released last May on probation.

DIED. SAMUEL ALDERSON, 90, inventor for NASA and the U.S. military who created the first crash test dummy-an anthropomorphic duplication of an adult male used to measure car safety; in Los Angeles. After developing dummies to test jet ejection seats and parachutes, he refined his work to suit the needs of the increasingly safety-conscious auto industry, introducing the first dummy specifically for cars, called the “V.I.P.,” in 1968.

DIED. SISTER LUCIA DE JESUS DOS SANTOS, 97, the last of three shepherd children who claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary in apparitions near the Portugese village of Fatima, since then a pilgrimage site for millions; at her convent in Coimbra, Portugal. In 1917, at age 10, she and two cousins said the Virgin offered revelations to them on the 13th of every month for five months. Though the children were jailed in efforts to get them to retract, church officials, after an exhaustive investigation, lent legitimacy to the visions in 1930 by calling them “worthy of belief.” By Daniel Simmons, with bureau reports

Performance of the Week
Two former U.S. Presidents, Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, arrived in Asia last week on a four-country tour to keep the world’s attention focused on the aftermath of the Dec. 26 tsunami. The pairin Democrat blue and Republican red, respectivelyvisited a stricken village in southern Thailand on their first stop; an emotional Bush praised “the spirit of the Thai people” while Clinton stressed the need “not to forget these people and places when all the cameras are not there.”