MILESTONES

EXPECTING. CYNDI LAUPER, 42, squeaky-voiced songstress, and her actor husband DAVID THORNTON, 42; their first child.

CONVICTED. DELMAR SIMPSON, 32, Army drill sergeant whose controversial trial for raping six trainees exposed the combustive interplay of sex and power in the Army's ranks; of 18 counts of rape; in Aberdeen, Md. Rejecting Simpson's defense that the sex was consensual, the six-person military jury sent an unequivocal message that any sexual relations between superiors and subordinates constitute rape. Simpson faces up to life in prison.

DIED. MIKE ROYKO, 64, caustic Pulitzer-prizewinning columnist who ruled the Windy City from his Page 3 pulpit; after surgery for an aneurysm; in Chicago. From high-society dames to low-down pols (a frequent target was former Mayor Richard J. Daley), no one was safe from Royko's pen, including himself, as he learned when minorities protested his tactless quips. But Royko remained unrepentantly irreverent in his column to the end.

DIED. BO WIDERBERG, 66, Swedish writer-director of trenchant films about young outsiders; of undisclosed causes; in Angelholm, Sweden. From his smart, sensitive Raven's End (1963) to the Lolita-in-reverse All Things Fair (1995), Widerberg sympathized with kids who valiantly and vainly fought the system. His 1967 hit Elvira Madigan, a lusciously limned story of love on the run, put Piano Concerto No. 21 on the charts. Mozart never sounded so sexy as when he underscored the doomed nuzzling of Pia Degermark and Thommy Berggren.

DIED. BERNARD VONNEGUT, 82, physicist who turned rainmaking into more than a song and dance; in Albany, N.Y. An expert in tempests and twisters, Vonnegut (brother of novelist Kurt) conjured rain in the 1940s by seeding clouds with silver iodide.

DIED. ANN PETRY, 88, African-American novelist who immortalized a grim Harlem street and its human casualties; in Old Saybrook, Conn. In The Street (1946), she shows how the hopes of its Harlem inhabitants were desiccated by a malevolent urban wasteland.

DIED. GABRIEL FIGUEROA, 90, Mexican camera poet; in Mexico City. Working with such top directors as Luis Bunuel (seven films), John Ford and Emilio Fernandez, this superb cinematographer illuminated many a craggy vista, from the parched roads in John Huston's The Night of the Iguana to the face of Clint Eastwood (in Two Mules for Sister Sara). Through Figueroa's lens, they all looked stark, profound, beautiful.

DIED. PENG ZHEN, 95, oldest of China's "Eight Immortals" whose longevity was equaled only by his authoritarian influence; in Beijing. Purged from his position as Beijing's mayor during the Cultural Revolution, he returned in 1978 as head of parliament under Deng Xiaoping. Peng later supported hard-line policies like cracking down on protesters in Tiananmen Square.