Eds: AMs. ADDS Pierre-Charles, Sabino. Separates for Caminiti, Pierre-Charles and Reeve moved on national wire. Separate for Caminiti also moved on sports wire.

By The Associated Press

Ken Caminiti

NEW YORK (AP) – Ken Caminiti, the National League’s 1996 most valuable player who later admitted using steroids during his major league baseball career, died Sunday of a heart attack, said his agent-lawyer Rick Licht. He was 41.

The city medical examiner’s office performed an autopsy Monday but could not rule on a cause of death until toxicology tests were complete, spokeswoman Ellen Borakove said.

The three-time All-Star third baseman often was in trouble the last few years. His 15-year big league career ended in 2001, five seasons after he led the Padres to a division title and was a unanimous pick for MVP.

Just last Tuesday, he admitted in a Houston court that he violated his probation by testing positive for cocaine last month, and was sentenced to 180 days in jail.

But state District Judge William Harmon gave Caminiti credit for the 189 days he already served in jail and a treatment facility since he was sentenced to three years probation for a cocaine arrest in March 2001. He had pleaded guilty in March 2002.

In May 2002, Caminiti told Sports Illustrated that he used steroids during his MVP season, when he hit a career-high .326 with 40 home runs and 130 RBIs. He estimated half the players in the big leagues were also using them.

Caminiti returned to baseball this year as a spring training instructor with San Diego.

Caminiti batted .272 with 239 homers and 983 RBIs with Houston, San Diego, Texas and Atlanta.

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James Chace

NEW YORK (AP) – James Chace, a historian and author of several influential foreign policy books, died of a heart attack Friday in Paris. He was 72.

His companion Joan Bingham, executive editor and vice president of New York publishing house Grove/Atlantic Press, told The New York Times that Chace was in Paris working on a book about the Marquis de Lafayette, the French statesman.

Chace is best known for his “Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World” about the secretary who served under President Truman and became a target of Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

Much of Chace’s work concerned statesmanship and became a respected resource on foreign policy thinking. The Dean Acheson book was even used in the Clinton White House when a Chace quote, “America, the indispensable nation” became commonplace among the administration’s advocates of intervening in Bosnia.

Chace translated French newspapers for the Central Intelligence Agency during the 1950s. He was managing editor of several foreign policy publications including East Europe, which dealt with Soviet bloc affairs, Interplay and Foreign Affairs.

He served as an editor for The New York Times Book Review and then became Henry Luce Professor in Freedom of Inquiry and Expression at Bard College in 1990. In 1992, he became editor of World Policy Journal.

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Gerard Pierre-Charles

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) – Prominent Haitian intellectual and politician Gerard Pierre-Charles died Sunday of heart failure in Cuba, where he was receiving emergency treatment for a lung infection, friends and colleagues said. He was 68.

Involved in politics for half a century, Pierre-Charles was an economist who wrote at least 16 books and a longtime communist whose ideology shifted toward the center after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Though the two were once allies, Pierre-Charles became a leading opponent of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, accusing him of betraying the poor and drifting toward dictatorship.

Though he never held elected office, Pierre-Charles became a leader of the Democratic Convergence, which staged protests until Aristide left amid a rebellion in February.

In 1959, Pierre-Charles helped found the Party of Popular Understanding, which later was absorbed into the Haitian Communist Party.

Communists faced persecution under dictator Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, and in 1960 Pierre-Charles began 26 years in exile, studying economics at Mexico’s National Autonomous University.

His falling out with Aristide came in 1997, when Pierre-Charles accused the former priest of trying to monopolize power.

Pierre-Charles’ supporters gathered signatures to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize last year.

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Christopher Reeve

MOUNT KISCO, N.Y. (AP) – Christopher Reeve, the chiseled, strapping “Superman” of celluloid who became another kind of hero as a force for spinal cord research after a devastating horse-riding accident, died Sunday of complications from an infection caused by a bedsore. He was 52.

Reeve was a quadriplegic for the last nine years of his life. He vowed that he would one day walk again

After winning worldwide fame as Superman in four films from 1978 to 1987 and struggling to “escape the cape” with later roles, Reeve became the face of spinal cord injury after his May 1995 riding accident in Culpeper, Va.

The injury left him without the use of his arms or legs; he could not breathe without a ventilator. He was still dealing with the horror of his injury six months later when he decided how he would spend the rest of his life.

He used his Hollywood fame to win attention and funding for scientific study of disabilities like his and to lobby for looser restrictions on stem-cell research.

Reeve landed a part on the soap opera “Love of Life” in 1974. His first Broadway role was as Katharine Hepburn’s grandson in “A Matter of Gravity,” and his first movie role was in the 1978 submarine movie “Gray Lady Down.”

Then came “Superman,” fame and wealth.

After the sequels, the 6-foot-4 Reeve played a crippled Vietnam veteran in “Fifth of July” on Broadway, a lovestruck time-traveler in the movie “Somewhere in Time,” and an aspiring playwright in the thriller “Deathtrap.”

In 1993 he appeared with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson in the critically praised “The Remains of the Day.”

Reeve did some directing and even returned to acting in a 1998 production of “Rear Window,” an update of the Hitchcock thriller. He won a Screen Actors Guild award for best actor in a TV movie or miniseries.

Recently, Reeve returned to the comic-book story that made him famous. He made several guest appearances on the WB series “Smallville” as Dr. Swann, a scientist who gave the teenage Clark Kent insight into his future as Superman.

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Fernando Sabino

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) – Fernando Sabino, whose colloquial stories of inland Brazil made him a best-selling author, died Monday of cancer, Rio’s O Globo newspaper reported. He was 80.

Sabino vaulted to fame in 1956 with the novel “A Time to Meet,” the tale of three friends in the inland city of Belo Horizonte. The book became compulsory reading for a generation of youngsters.

Best known for his essays and short stories, Sabino also enjoyed commercial acclaim with “The Great Mentecapto” and “The Naked Man,” which were made into films.

Sabino was part of a celebrated literary circle from the rural state of Minas Gerais, whose members included Helio Pellegrino, Otto Lara Resende and Paulo Mendes Campos.

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