Milestones Sep. 4, 2000

ORDERED RELEASED ON BAIL. WEN HO LEE, 60, fired Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist suspected by the FBI of espionage in smuggling U.S. nuclear secrets to China; by a federal judge’s decision; after eight months’ solitary confinement in a Santa Fe, N.M., prison. Judge James Parker ruled that the case for holding Lee as a security threat until his Nov. 6 trial was unpersuasive. Lee must still meet $1 million bail and be stringently monitored at his home.

DIED. EDWARD CRAVEN WALKER, 82, unabashed nudist and inventor of the oozing 1960s groovy-soothing lava lamp; in Ringwood, England. After the lamp buyer at Harrod’s found Walker’s display of sculptural, sinuous paraffin-and-oil globs “disgusting,” Walker took it elsewhere and hit big. “You can avoid going on drugs,” he once said. “If you have a lava lamp, you won’t need them.”

DIED. ANDY HUG, 35, world-champion Swiss kick boxer, karate expert and aspiring film actor; of acute leukemia; in Tokyo. Growing up an orphan in Switzerland and teased by schoolmates, Hug was inspired by the Rocky movies and trained relentlessly in martial arts from age 12. Considered the Michael Jordan of his sport, he was mobbed in Europe and Japan. Last week, after enduring nausea and nosebleeds, Hug was admitted to a Tokyo hospital with a high fever and was found to have leukemia. He was put on chemotherapy but suffered immediate organ failure and brain damage.

DIED. HARRY OPPENHEIMER, 91, billionaire South African mining magnate and chairman of diamond giant De Beers; in Johannesburg. Though he spoke out in 1989 against the racial policies that “made South Africa stink in the nostrils of decent, human people around the world,” his business dealings were muddied by an iron adherence to horrible working conditions in his mines and a migrant-labor system that paid blacks far less than whites. He admitted his failures and, 10 years ago, stepped up efforts to end apartheid, recognizing the A.N.C., funding black education and bringing together Nelson Mandela and Zulu leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi just days before the first all-race election, thus averting a civil war (see Eulogy, below).